Speed=ping?


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Ping has nothing to do with speed. A ping is the time a packet of data takes to traverse from the source (your computer) to its destination and back.

A ping uses ICMP, which is a connectionless protocol, therefore the speed at which the ping travels is determined by the routers (hops) between your computer and the destination IP, not by how fast your own connection is or even how fast the destination IP is.

A ping in the network world is mainly used to determine the existance of the "destination". In the sense that if you get a reply, then the "destination" exists, if you dont, it doesnt.

Your ping result depends on what destination you are trying to reach. Pinging the same host over and over again will give u the same ping in 99% of the cases unless a router in the path (which your ISP is not responsible for) is having problems. Another case is what some have mentioned here:

A normal ping sends a packet of 32bytes. A dialup modem with a speed of 56kbits is equivalent to 7000bytes. Therefore even with a dialup you are just sending out 32bytes of out of your 7000bytes modem. So if you use a modem to ping a host, and you get a ping reply of 120ms, you will get the same ping reply if you do it using a 1mbit cable line (provided they take the same hops/route to the destination) .

The reason some have higher pings when they are using their bandwidth is simple. Lets take the modem example. Say a person is downloading a file, he is using all the available bandwith to him, which is 7000bytes. Now you ping that person with 32bytes of data. His PC needs to "download" those 32bytes, but it is already maxed out. What happens there is a slight delay for your computer to finish processing the current stream of data, it then allocates 32bytes to download (recieve) your ICMP ping request (at this moment the speed of the downloaded file will decrease from 7000bytes to ... you guessed it, 6968bytes). That delay in the response is what causes the higher ping, but then again its only a fraction of a second (milliseconds). If you capped your download to 6968bytes or below, that delay will not exist.

It is common sense not to download or upload anything while you are playing games on the net. This has nothing to do with pings, but rather the amount of bandwidth you are suing versus the amount of bandwidth the game requires.

The tweaks you have been laboring on will not change your ping, but will help your TCP data transfer. As you have already noticed.

Infact, go to the DSL reports tweak page: http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks

It is clearly stated right there in the red box "Tweaking will not fix: Your ping time"

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