What a ping test tells you
Three numbers, and what each one means.
Ping sends ICMP echo request packets to a host and times the reply. The round-trip time (RTT) is how long a packet needs to get there and back. If every packet comes back, the host is reachable. If some go missing, that is packet loss, and it usually points at a congested link or a firewall that rate-limits ICMP.
Our numbers are measured from Frankfurt, Germany. A host in Amsterdam will answer in a few milliseconds, one in Singapore in about 160 ms. That is physics, not a problem with the host. Compare hosts against each other, not against zero.
How to use it
- Enter any IPv4 address, IPv6 address or domain name in the field above.
- Press Ping. We send 4 ICMP packets to the target and wait up to 10 seconds.
- You get packet loss, min, average and max RTT, jitter, and the country and provider of the target IP.
- "Show raw output" gives you the exact ping command output, ready to copy into a ticket.
Results are cached for five minutes per host, so a repeat within that window shows the same numbers. If the host answers ping but a website on it is slow, the traceroute shows where on the path the time goes.