Ping times from reference servers

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too much loving
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Ping times from reference servers

Post by too much loving »

I was just thinking that it could be cool to have a website that included ping times to each server from several computers at welldefined places in the world. The output could look like this:

viper2.pimpi.org:5158
Ping from Berlin = 50ms
Ping from New york = 200ms
Ping from Australia = 500ms

That would make it easier to determine whether a server was European or American. Of course this would require some coding and worldwide collaboration, but it might be useful to have. Therefore I hereby toss the idea into the air.

PS: Admittedly Strayers server does provide the host country of most servers, but it cannot read all domains. Maybe I am trying to fix a very small problem here. http://bzstats.strayer.de/servers/
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Grace F
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Post by Grace F »

There was a topic a while back. I think I started it :? It was about Australian Players if I remember correctly.

It was suggested in that topic that it would be nice to have ping times next to the name of a server/map on the Official Server List (BZFlag.exe). I think that idea was also agreed on, but you'll need to do some searching to find that out :)
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Post by too much loving »

Grace F wrote:There was a topic a while back. I think I started it :? It was about Australian Players if I remember correctly.
I think I was a little unclear. I started this thread because I had thought of a way to add server ping times to a website. As far as I can see your thread is about enhancing the client (but I should probably have posted there anyway). http://my.bzflag.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=10227 .

By the way the idea of adding ping times to the client has been suggested several times, starting with feature request [ 554185 ] from 2002 (Google is fun) http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.ph ... tid=353248 .

Also by the way: It occurs to me that I should probably have posted this in the fansites forum. Forum admins should feel free to flame me and/or move this topic at will.
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Post by asciimonster »

I'm not quite sure that the server admins would like the increased amount of pings on their networks. Transfer speeds are already the limiting factor on these servers.

You should make that data into a map. Green is low ping, red is high ping. You can interpolate the rest of the points. Hmm. That's a nice idea for a new website. :wink:
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Catoblepas
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Post by Catoblepas »

Incase you wanted a way to calculate the ping time......

First of you need to know the speed of light, (which is also the speed of electricity) the speed of light is
299,792,458 metres per second. Now what you need to know is how far away sorce `a` is from sorce `b`, to do that, you can use google earth, for example
is a server was in America Washington, and the player was in England London the distance would be in metres `7373000`, so now the math is....

Code: Select all

7373000
divided by
299,792,458
times
2
equals (to 3 decimal points)
0.049
So thats 0.049 seconds, so your magic number is..............
49ms

I hope you found this explanation usfull (I kinda rushed it)

Please correct me if I am wrong, false information is the worse kind.
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Post by too much loving »

Catoblepas wrote: Please correct me if I am wrong, false information is the worse kind.
According to random internet pages, your calculation doesn't give precise results. This is partly because light travels slower in a fibre and partly because of switches and other hardware thingies that the signal has to pass through along the way:
http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=143
http://blog.forret.com/2004/11/its-the-latency-stupid/
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Catoblepas
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Post by Catoblepas »

Oh yeah :oops: I forgot to mention the addition of hardware, I just calculated the plain time of lights speed with no interuptions.
Infact electricity travels one third of it's full speed when traveling through fiber.

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L4m3r
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Post by L4m3r »

It has been suggested that there just be ping times in the server list. Something direct like that would be live, and much more useful to individual players. ;)
Optimism is just a milder alternative to denial.
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Post by Macrosoft »

Cotlebas: you also assumed that the packets would take a direct path to the server.
they may have to travel much further
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Post by Catoblepas »

Macrosoft, that isn't a major delay in the ping so that is why I didn't include it.
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Post by joevano »

Catoblepas wrote:Macrosoft, that isn't a major delay in the ping so that is why I didn't include it.
I would disagree, the route a packet takes CAN add time to the ping. That is why TCP packets have to be reordered once they reach a machine, some packets take longer to reach their destination host, and the reason is the route taken. There is no guarantee that two packets transmitted one right after another will reach their destination by the same route or in the same order.

I can from experience tell you that a ping times for a client in the UK (your example) to a server in Washington (Tadd's) is about 200ms. Some of this equipment and the other variable is the route a packet takes.
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Post by The Vaxorcist »

Ahem. There's already a patch out to add the pingtimes to the client server menu. (Written by yours truly) Check it out at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.ph ... tid=303248. Hopefully, it will be a part of BZFlag 2.2
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