What is TOO HIGH A PING?
 

Hi, I dont understand the Ping philosophy and kindly ask for help. When online gaming I get thrown out for too high a ping of about 150. Why is that number too high when other gamers stay on with over 300s. Can I change the ping setting (or anything else) to correct the problem?

Really keen to get this sorted out, please help and thanks in advance for your time.

CW

Hi there. I think ping is worked out how fast the signal gets to/from your computer to the game server.

Your ping sounds pretty good to be honest, of course the lower the better but 150 isn't bad at all.

You shouldn't get booted though for that, what server are you connecting to, maybe they should change their settings a bit higher.

One server I use gives me a ping of around 120 but that fluctuates quite a bit, never goes highter than say 180, another will give me a ping of about 75, not bad for a 2Mb connection. Just depends on the server really.

Only other thing to do would be get a faster connection, 2Mb or 8 as I have seen lately as you cannot change the ping yourself.

the other thing to watch out for is where the server you are playing on is located.

For instance in Battlefield 2 I get pings of between 30 and 100 playing on UK based servers.

EU based it goes up to 60 - 150

US based 100 - 250

Far east forget it your already dead.

This is all on 1meg bband from zen.

Some BF2 servers auto kick for pings higher than 200.

What is Ping

I find not running other internet applications helps, so no downloading while trying to frag people.:8

Ping uses ICMP (internet control message protocol) to send a small packet of data to a specific address which responds by sending an 'echo' and the response time can be given in textual or graphical format.

You can use it to test the availability of web site to see if it's online. In Windows click Start, Run and enter cmd to open a DOS window. In the window type "ping www.websiteaddress.com"

This will send continuous four ping packets to the address like this:

C\>ping www.bbc.co.uk

Pinging www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.224.114] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 212.58.224.114: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=247
Reply from 212.58.224.114: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=247
Reply from 212.58.224.114: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=247
Reply from 212.58.224.114: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=247

Ping statistics for 212.58.224.114:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 16ms, Maximum = 25ms, Average = 20ms

Use 'ping -t www.websiteaddress.com' for continuous pings.

You are correct in that response times depend on which continent and which country the server resides. Also, any problems on the internet or with your ISP can affect the response times or even prevent access completely.

Another command that shows the route the date is taking is "traceroute". For some reason Microsoft decided to abbreviate this command in Windows to "tracert"

So c\ tracert www.bbc.co.uk will show you the path the BBC web site.

traceroute is abbreviated to conform to the DOS 8.3 filename limitation.