In reply to a post by MHC:

Get yourself a copy of PingPlotter - older versions are free.

It actually runs a Trace Route (tracert) function whereby it pings the target device with the TTL parameter set to 1. That means it will be responded to by the first device it meets. It then sends a ping with TTL=2 which reaches the second device and so on until it reaches the ultimate target.


You will see a graph of Ping times for each node on the route and they will settle with an average time, however every now and again one may suddenly jump to hundreds of milliseconds whilst everything else is responding normally.

It is quite possible to have the average time for an intermediate node higher than that of a target - it shows that messages going through are given higher priority than responding to the ping command - which is correct.

Have a play with it and you will end up with a better understanding of "ping" and why it is an indicative value and not set in stone.

Just be sure to understand the results properly, I know of a case where someone was complaining quite loudly of spikes of 200MS and packetloss on the first hop even though they were actually getting a very nice 9ms to the destination and showing no packet loss to the actual final destination.

It was a nightmare trying to get them to understand that the router responded to pings at a very low priority and also responding to ping relies on the CPU where as the actual packet forwarding was being done by an ASIC

In reply to a post by bobble_bob:

Cheers. Guess at the end of the day there isnt much you can do about pings. If the many nodes you're going through on the way to the destination decide to give the ping a low priority for whatever reason, then it will show on your graph as a high ping

In some devices the ping response is handled by the CPU which depending on the device capabilities may exist purely for the control plane and since it's job is effectively to allow management access to its often a pretty low end component.

You should only really worry about the loss/response if it appears to be also affecting subsequent hops

Using wired connection to the router I would hope as wireless will give fluctuations.

A quality response (from the bbc.co.uk) would be steady ie a steady 20ms or a steady 60ms.

A poor response would be fluctuations ie 25ms rising to 60ms and dropping again. Makes no difference for web browsing but for gaming it can be an issue.