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Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

ping.projects.chrisjeakle.com

21–30 of 64 posts

Re: Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

#21
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was it possible to read "easier way to test my ping than pulling up a terminal" but not finish the sentence to "especially when I'm on my phone or any other device that doesn't have a terminal"?

especially when I'm on my phone or any other device that doesn't have a terminal Mine does, and in fact I have used the ping command from it before. I highly recommend having a terminal app.

Why do you highly recommend it? Don't think I've ever thought while using a phone "damn I wish I had a Linux terminal handy"

Re: Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

#22

I use https://www.cloudping.info/ Although it’s sad to see they put political messages in it now

I would take those numbers with a grain of salt. That site claims I have a 3ms ping to a digital ocean droplet in Singapore. Either I have proven faster-than-light information transfer or that measurement is off by several orders of magnitude.

Re: Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

#23
post #22

I use https://www.cloudping.info/ Although it’s sad to see they put political messages in it now

I would take those numbers with a grain of salt. That site claims I have a 3ms ping to a digital ocean droplet in Singapore. Either I have proven faster-than-light information transfer or that measurement is off by several orders of magnitude.

They could be using anycast, but the pings for Digitalocean seemed correct to me

Re: Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

#25
Can HN please reject any submissions that are not HTTPS urls? The number of sites that get submitted here via plaintext http is shocking.

To anyone who just started typing out something to inform me that "it doesn't matter on _______ site because _______": there are four purposes of encryption, not just "confidentiality."

Re: Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

#26

Sorry for being unappreciative but... is this... satire? I honestly don't know... 'easier way to test my ping than pulling up a terminal', ... so a non https website that needs javascript is better than terminal-shortcut + $ ping 8.8.8.8 (or whatever you want to ping, you also could set up an alias/function in your .bashrc to do something more complex)... can I hit that point home: "easier way than pulling up my term…

It's even easier to have a ping going in the corner of my laptop screen. Since the Win7 days I've used SimplePing, on my work Mac the app store wanted 99c for this privilege but there's a free one that does the same thing.

Re: Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

#27
post #13

Sorry for being unappreciative but... is this... satire? I honestly don't know... 'easier way to test my ping than pulling up a terminal', ... so a non https website that needs javascript is better than terminal-shortcut + $ ping 8.8.8.8 (or whatever you want to ping, you also could set up an alias/function in your .bashrc to do something more complex)... can I hit that point home: "easier way than pulling up my term…

How was it possible to read "easier way to test my ping than pulling up a terminal" but not finish the sentence to "especially when I'm on my phone or any other device that doesn't have a terminal"?

Can't say I've ever felt the need to test ping from my phone other than finding out if my wifi AP was dead while I was in the attic troubleshooting. There's an app for that.

Re: Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

#29
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

especially when I'm on my phone or any other device that doesn't have a terminal Mine does, and in fact I have used the ping command from it before. I highly recommend having a terminal app.

Why do you highly recommend it? Don't think I've ever thought while using a phone "damn I wish I had a Linux terminal handy"

I suppose if you don't think of your phone as the general-purpose computer that it really is, then it won't seem obvious. But otherwise, I also recall using dig, netcat, traceroute, and a few other network tools a few times. Having a shell, even a root one, is one of those things that you don't need often, but when you do, you really do.

Re: Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

#30
post #9

Great start! One way you could improve this is to not stop at just reporting a single data point but report the P50, P75, and P90 of a reasonable set of data points. Also, it's probably better to call this HTTP latency rather than ping since the latter is on a much lower layer in the OSI model.

These are great points, I appreciate it!

Labelling this a "ping" was a poor choice on my part. I meant ping in the RTT/latency sense, rather than an ICMP sense. Calling it "HTTP latency" is a huge improvement that clearly (and concisely) gets the idea across, I made a quick edit to do just that.

RE: recording a range of samples and reporting percentiles: My hope is to keep the code super simple and the delay to visible info in the UI very low. Elsewhere in the thread folks mentioned the excellent http://gcping.com/. That site has a ton of destinations to test latency to and reports the median of a number of samples - that is a really cool feature set! I don't think I'll be able to do anything close to that in tens of lines of inline JS, unfortunately.

Still, the measurements start super noisy and I'd like to ensure my site gives useful data even at the start. I did a bit of a hack to hopefully force the RTT to converge to something useful. I now fire off 3 time-delayed measurements after the page loads. By the time the third finishes, the numbers appear to be pretty stable.

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