The machine that goes PING!

[kiwibarguy]

A title for the older generations!

Yes i was wondering about ping and was wanting to know what a good, average and bad ping level is?I am now running on ethernet at 100mbps and was surprised to see that there are still high numbers.

Would you consider the above ping and amount of green servers to be normal for you?

By the way, WHOOOO HOOOO it's FRIDAY!!!!

[HardCorePawn]

Ping is not so much related to your connection to the router/modem... changing from USB to ethernet is not really going to improve it (if at all)...

As most of them are likely to be hosted offshore (ie USA)... you'll find the pings are likely to be in the 300+ms range... not ideal, but thats why you generally play games on local servers...

You may find AU servers that are relatively low ping... but in general, you'll need to find NZ servers...

It takes a while to get a packet of data from NZ to the US and back again!

[Timmo]

Yep- I find thinking about a water hose a useful concept when trying to explain it

the MBPS rating is more like the diameter of the hose whereas a high ping will be experienced when the length of hose is long (i.e. even if you have a massive hose *like me *, it will still take a long time for the water to travel the length of it)

haha

[Alex]

harharharhar very funny Timmo

Alex

[ZK-MAT]

As said earlier your ethernet connection to your router means diddly squat as far as connecting to the outside world. You'll be limited to whatever speed you get from your ISP, then whatever connection they have to other servers.

Also, pings are the speed that information sends from you to the server then back to you. You can have lower pings with a slower connection if your upload speed is closer to your download speed. This means that my 2500 up and 2500 down connection pings lower to servers than someone with a 6000 down and a 128 up adsl connection.

Ultimately the ping doesn't tell you you have a good connection, but using ethernet to connect to the router is a step in the right direction.

[mjrhealth]

Actually this broadband speed ping is quiet unrelated, uless you are using dial up speeds. A ping is the time it takes a packet to be sent from your machine to the server and back again,and i think its used to see if the other machine is still ther but contains no data. and dosnt change even on dial up, but it does start to become an issue when you are shoveling a lot of data about or your machine is working hard or even if the server is working hard, remembering that the server has to send more or less the same data to a number of machines, which is why quiet often the pings may get higher as more people join as the server has to share its time with the other machines as well. Ie you take off, your machine updates its position to the server,the server now tells your machine its got the data, updates your position in the game, then has to tell all the other machines where you are and wait for their responses all the while its tying to ping each machine for what ever reason, now if someone has a bad connection and drops a packet thngs can go really bad as tcpip will try get that data resent or resend the data it lost and all of a sudden pings go through the roof, which is a good reason for staying on servers with pings less than 240 ms especialy when playing shoot them up games. ( by the time you fire your bullet the player has already moved but you wont see it because of the delay and you will miss him ) This works quiet well even on dial as long as the speed is better than 48k or so as really on one machine there isnt a lot of data being sent. If you are using USB then you have another issue in that the pc only talks to each port for a set period of time whether there is something plugged into it or not ( polling ) that is how it knows you plugged your usb stick in. so you have added an extra delay, your pc also has to encode and decode every packet being sent plus correcting errors, keeping track of what packets are being sent and received or lost and need resending while on top of this its driving your game as well, thats a lot of time sharing whcih all affects your ping. There are a few dedicated ethernet cards that actually do all the work for the pc and they can help if you have a really slow machine as it removes some of the overheads. I may be a little wromg and happy to be corrected, but i think im 99 % correct.