How to test your ping time

Want to test your ping time to any game server or website to see how laggy your connection is? Well it may seem technical but it's really simple actually.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• a windows computer
• an internet connection

1. Click on the start button and then from the start menu, click on "Run..." This will open then little built in run anything program in Windows.
2. the command console Either type command or cmd into the text box and click okay. Both will open the windows command console, as pictured in the attached image. It should have your user name that you're logged in as instead of "Peter" which is mine.
3. The best general test of your ping time is to ping one of the fastest server networks on the internet. Type ping -t google.com. Ping tells it you want to do a ping test, -t tells it you want to keep pinging until you tell it to stop, and the target is the domain name google.com. If you want to test your connection speed to a game server and know the IP address, you can replace google.com with the game server. Or you can test your connection to any other website.
4. Once you press enter, it will start sending pings to google.com and tell you how much time in milliseconds it takes for the ping to make it back. All a ping really is is a tiny packet of data that's sent to the server with a note that tells the server to bounce it back immediately. As the test runs, you'll start to see entries come. You can let it run as long as you want and to stop it press control C. It will draw some conclusions about what happened and print them at the end.
5. a sample ping Attached is a short, sample ping test I did. In any given line, it says Reply from and then an IP address. That's the IP address of the server that replied. Bytes is the size of the packets you're sending for the test. 32 bytes is standard. Time is the total round trip time in milliseconds. And TTL is time to live. That's sort of complicated but don't worry about that field. A shorter ping time is better because you can load webpages and play online games in realtime with a lot less delay. If your ping time to google is over 70 ms, that's not very good. It could mean you live in a rather rural area with a lot of paths for the data to travel down before it gets to the major hubs of the internet. Or if you're on a wireless connection, it will be that high or worse, especially if you're using an old wireless router. At the end of the report is the fastest and slowest times and the average time. Also listed is the packet loss. Lost packets are really bad because that means they never made it to the server or the server didn't reply. With low quality websites on bad web servers, you might lose a couple but to google, it should be 0% loss.
6. So what can you learn from ping tests? Well if you can't ping a server at all, there's something wrong with your connection or the server is down or you're banned from it. If you lose a lot of packets, either your wireless connection isn't very good or the server isn't very good. It could also be a sign of a failing or damaged ethernet cable. If a couple of your pings take significantly longer than the rest, that means something delayed it. It could be anything from the destination server being too busy or your router or modem being bad or your computer being too slow. If all your pings are really high like over 150ms, it could be because the destination is on the other side of the world. I can't get a ping time under 150 to any Japanese servers. It could also mean that your firewall or router are delaying all outgoing traffic. Or your internet service provider isn't very good. So if you see anything wrong, always re-test later and if problems continue, take the necessary steps to address them.