Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping

Show HN: An ultra-light-weight tool to quickly test your ping(ping.projects.chrisjeakle.com)

96 points by PNWChris 3 years ago | 61 comments

Howdy HN!

I find myself testing my ping from time to time, especially when my internet seems wonky while WFH. It feels like there should be an easier way test my ping than puling up a terminal or a complex web app - especially when I'm on my phone or any other device that doesn't have a terminal.

I figured I should be the change I wish to see in the world and created this super light ping test.

I also created a latency monitoring solution (https://github.com/cjjeakle/network-monitor), feel free to clone and try it out! I know there are a lot more mature monitoring solutions out there, but I never did figure out how to set them up. This one is super simple: clone it to some device that's always on, compile it, set up some systemd stuff, and it's ready to rock on port 8180!

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 3 years ago |

Sorry for being unappreciative but... is this... satire? I honestly don't know...

'easier way to test my ping than pulling up a terminal', ... so a non https website that needs javascript is better than terminal-shortcut + <terminal>$ ping 8.8.8.8</terminal> (or whatever you want to ping, you also could set up an alias/function in your .bashrc to do something more complex)...

can I hit that point home: "easier way than pulling up my terminal", answer: a non-https javascript needing website!!!

>>> 'super simple: clone it to some device that's always on, compile it, set up some systemd stuff, and it's ready to rock on port 8180'

"super simple"... sounds... super simple... installing rust nightly as we speak to build it /s

this world of ours

PNWChris 3 years ago | |

Fair enough. I think technical users probably don't need this site, but I think there is value to be had (even for those technical users!).

For a bit of context:

I found myself using this site via my xbox's web browser to make sure my wifi latency is acceptable where I put the xbox.

Also, my spouse and I just moved to a new place, so I used this site on my phone to get a quick idea of the latency on wifi in my spouse's office.

There's tons of web-based tools to test your bandwidth, but I feel there just isn't a similar ecosystem of quick, web-based "ping" (well, latency, since I can't send ICMP packets from a web browser) tools.

RE: HTTP only, good point. I've set up certbot and the page supports https now. I am not certain how HTTPS will impact the latency measurements, it appears the results are typically a bit higher and occasionally much higher when using HTTPS.

I don't get the disappointment with the use of JS. It's just a bit of inline JS, easy to manually audit if concerned. JS is quite safe IMO and is a very powerful tool, it makes a rich universe of interactive applications possible in the humble web browser. I basically got into CS because of the fun I had creating things for and sharing things on the web.

alrlroipsp 3 years ago | | |

> so I used this site on my phone to get a quick idea of the latency on wifi in my spouse's office.

Sure you did. But there's a whole category of phone apps called Wifi Heat maps, that would actually be "super simple" for a non-techie to use.

People are commenting on your use of javascript, where you are arguing that you built a super simple solution. As many already pointed out, the ping command is already there and is more "super simple" to use than to self host a website to get a skewed HTTP "ping" from some cloud service...

ipsum2 3 years ago | |

How was it possible to read "easier way to test my ping than pulling up a terminal" but not finish the sentence to "especially when I'm on my phone or any other device that doesn't have a terminal"?

userbinator 3 years ago | | |

especially when I'm on my phone or any other device that doesn't have a terminal

Mine does, and in fact I have used the ping command from it before. I highly recommend having a terminal app.

alrlroipsp 3 years ago | | |

I mean most of us techies know better ways.

On your phone you run for example Fing

Fing iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fing-network-scanner/id4309211...

Fing Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.overlook.a...

With Fing App’s free tools and utilities help you:

• Scan networks with Fing’s Wi-Fi & LAN network scanner and discover all devices connected to any network

• Get the most accurate device recognition of IP address, MAC address, device name, model, vendor and manufacturer

• Run WiFi and Cellular internet speed tests, download speed and upload speed analysis and latency

• Browse internet outages in your area, ISP ratings, reviews and speed statistics

• Advanced device analysis of NetBIOS, UPnP, SNMP and Bonjour names, properties and device types

• Includes port scanning, device ping, traceroute and DNS lookup

• Receive network security and device alerts to your phone and email

dicknuckle 3 years ago | | |

Can't say I've ever felt the need to test ping from my phone other than finding out if my wifi AP was dead while I was in the attic troubleshooting. There's an app for that.

yjftsjthsd-h 3 years ago | | |

My phone does have a terminal, and I run ping in termux regularly.

thehappypm 3 years ago | |

This isn’t Shark Tank. OP built something to share, not looking for seed funding or a Nobel. Relax!

dicknuckle 3 years ago | |

It's even easier to have a ping going in the corner of my laptop screen. Since the Win7 days I've used SimplePing, on my work Mac the app store wanted 99c for this privilege but there's a free one that does the same thing.

goodpoint 3 years ago | |

Looking at the readme I really thought it was satire:

https://github.com/cjjeakle/network-monitor

hatware 3 years ago | |

Definitely has a "but why?" vibe to it. OP probably learned a lot getting this up and that's usually what motivates me to learn.

andrepd 3 years ago | |

I for one welcome the era of PaaS (ping as a service).

goodpoint 3 years ago | | |

...for only $9 a month.

a1445c8b 3 years ago |

Great start!

One way you could improve this is to not stop at just reporting a single data point but report the P50, P75, and P90 of a reasonable set of data points.

Also, it's probably better to call this HTTP latency rather than ping since the latter is on a much lower layer in the OSI model.

PNWChris 3 years ago | |

These are great points, I appreciate it!

Labelling this a "ping" was a poor choice on my part. I meant ping in the RTT/latency sense, rather than an ICMP sense. Calling it "HTTP latency" is a huge improvement that clearly (and concisely) gets the idea across, I made a quick edit to do just that.

RE: recording a range of samples and reporting percentiles: My hope is to keep the code super simple and the delay to visible info in the UI very low. Elsewhere in the thread folks mentioned the excellent http://gcping.com/. That site has a ton of destinations to test latency to and reports the median of a number of samples - that is a really cool feature set! I don't think I'll be able to do anything close to that in tens of lines of inline JS, unfortunately.

Still, the measurements start super noisy and I'd like to ensure my site gives useful data even at the start. I did a bit of a hack to hopefully force the RTT to converge to something useful. I now fire off 3 time-delayed measurements after the page loads. By the time the third finishes, the numbers appear to be pretty stable.

silisili 3 years ago |

Really lightweight, nicely done.

For even more sites/pops, https://gcping.com exists which I believe pings each GCP region worldwide. It feels a bit heavier, as it takes at least a few seconds before I see (relevant to me in the US) results.

heywoodlh 3 years ago |

This is super cool! I like the ability to review previous results. Not sure why people are getting so hung up on how ping in the terminal is so much simpler.

Not sure if this is desired, but if at some point alerting was built into this, that would be awesome.

---

On a related note, I currently use the following tools to monitor my network:

- bash-uptime[1] -- BASH script I wrote for simple (for me) icmp/http monitoring.

- iPerf3 server so I can test my bandwidth speeds over the LAN or Wireguard

- Nfcapd/nfdump to ingest netflow from my firewall and router and give me the ability to search that netflow with nfdump (I have a multi-arch Docker image for Nfcapd that I maintain[2])

- Syslog-ng to ingest logs and write them to my filesystem with some scripts I use to search the logs quickly via grep

- Gotify for all my network-related notifications

[1] https://github.com/heywoodlh/bash-uptime

[2] https://hub.docker.com/r/heywoodlh/nfcapd

sammy2255 3 years ago |

I use https://www.cloudping.info/

Although it’s sad to see they put political messages in it now

tfsh 3 years ago | |

I think it's sad we live in a world where an unobtrusive acknowledgment of modern day slavery is adversely received.

sammy2255 3 years ago | | |

I’m against slavery. I’m also against putting political messages into software

ipython 3 years ago | |

I would take those numbers with a grain of salt. That site claims I have a 3ms ping to a digital ocean droplet in Singapore. Either I have proven faster-than-light information transfer or that measurement is off by several orders of magnitude.

Jamie9912 3 years ago | | |

They could be using anycast, but the pings for Digitalocean seemed correct to me

patricklorio 3 years ago |

http://ping.playit.gg/ embeds the request epoch in the TCP sequence number to give you your ping.

  Client SYN => 
             <= Server SYN+ACK \w epoch in sequence
  Client ACK =>
             <= HTTP payload calculating ping with NOW - ACK number

PNWChris 3 years ago | |

Oh snap, that is cool! Does the server use raw sockets to pull that off? Or are regular ole TCP sockets capable of this?

patricklorio 3 years ago | | |

It’s custom software for tunneling (primarily game servers). All the packets are handled directly using AF-XDP. It’s also on an anycast network and this endpoint is used to debug routing issues.

Matthias247 3 years ago |

The times will be super different between initial load and retries, since the first request requires a potential DNS lookup, establishing a TCP connection, and potential TLS handshake, and only then the request can be performed. Follow-up requests don't require an additional connection.

If you want timings only for TCP connection establishment, or only for the request, you can use the browsers navigation timing APIs to get those: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Performance/Nav...

KMnO4 3 years ago | |

Won’t the browser first do an OPTION before the test (GET) starts? The lookups should be cached.

Matthias247 3 years ago | | |

you can check it in the network tab. It won't.

PNWChris 3 years ago |

OP here! Great discussion, it's made me realize I should also share my favorite speed test: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

It both tests bandwdith and gives some cool latency measurements (both idle and under load). It's super helpful at diagnosing bufferbloat if there is any on your network connection.

I don't run it much since I don't want to tear through my ISP's data cap, but is an excellent tool.

vdfs 3 years ago |

Not an expert but this doesn't seem like normal ping, it's rather how much HTTP request take including handshakes and content download

netsharc 3 years ago | |

I wonder if it could be done better using WebSockets: setup the connection, start the stopwatch, send a byte, wait to receive a byte, stop the stopwatch, and close the connection.

vitus 3 years ago | |

Not entirely.

Modern browsers / webservers will keep TCP connections alive for at least a few minutes. I ran a tcpdump and confirmed there's only one network round trip involved in the critical path (after the first request, anyhow), with a transfer of a few hundred bytes in each direction (HTTP overhead, but nowhere near big enough to incur processing delays on the same scale as propagation delay).

(The actual packets sent: HTTP GET from my end, HTTP response from the server, ACK from my end.)

The latency is still 20-40ms higher than ping times, although it's not clear to me whether that's due to disk seek latency, server load, or something else.

PNWChris 3 years ago | | |

This is super helpful context, thank you! I was wondering why the RTTs appeared to converge only after a couple retries, and why the first measurement was so wildly different when pulling up the page after some time away.

isatty 3 years ago |

I’m on my phone and I can’t debug/look into it but the jitter is very high.

Over 5 tries I’ve received widely varying ping times to SF, two of which were 1s while NYC was 140 ms ish.

Just weird because I’m on a reliable connection in SF (sonic).

vdfs 3 years ago | |

The code my clarify that up, it simply calculate how much time an http request take to complete:

  function ping_test() {
     time_request("http://ping.projects.chrisjeakle.com/ping/data.txt", "result-east");
     time_request("http://ping.projects-west.chrisjeakle.com/ping/data.txt", "result-west");
  }

  function time_request(url, output_id) {
      document.getElementById(output_id).innerText = "...";
      const start_time = new Date().getTime();
      fetch(url, {
          mode: "no-cors",
          cache: "no-cache",
        }).then(async (result) => {
          const elapsed_time = new Date().getTime() - start_time;
          document.getElementById(output_id).innerText = elapsed_time;
      });
  }

0x0 3 years ago | | |

You should consider switching to window.performance.now() as that is a monotonically increasing clock, instead of a wall clock that might randomly be adjusted with time sync services.

Also, maybe you should run the tests in sequence instead of at the same time. I wonder if running two concurrent fetches might disadvantage the second fetch?

amelius 3 years ago |

Nice. Now all you need is a catchy URL so people can remember it.

therealdrag0 3 years ago |

I like this one which I think was a Show HN a while ago

https://github.com/apenwarr/blip

ultrahax 3 years ago |

I miss Netalyzer ( http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/ )

2b3a51 3 years ago |

Perhaps pop a noscript tag in the page with a warning ('this page uses a javascript function')?

KennyBlanken 3 years ago |

Can HN please reject any submissions that are not HTTPS urls? The number of sites that get submitted here via plaintext http is shocking.

To anyone who just started typing out something to inform me that "it doesn't matter on _______ site because _______": there are four purposes of encryption, not just "confidentiality."

PNWChris 3 years ago | |

Fair point! Just got all the certbot stuff set up. Wasn't too bad, though at first glance it appears there may be a bit more variance in the RTTs.

Edit:

I think I found a way to get the best of both worlds!

I've removed certbot's 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS and made it so the protocol used during latency measurements matches the page's state. Now if one wants HTTPS they can use it, but if they want a slightly more stable measurement they can use the http page.

dave_taht 3 years ago |

flent.org has some heavy duty, wonderful graphic tests.

IndigoIncognito 3 years ago |

Love it