Unable to compare ping times on fly

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/725269

  •  05-09-2019
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Question

I tried the following command unsuccessfully

sdiff <(ping www.nato.int) <(ping www.reuters.com)

Is there any way to have a real-time comparison between ping times?

Was it helpful?

Solution

Usually I just open two xterms side-by-side and run ping in each. Or in one terminal "ping host1 & ping host2&"

fping -e will give you the latency to a list of hosts in one run. So you can just do: watch fping -e www.google.com www.yahoo.com www.kernel.org

Not everyone has watch, but you can just do this (and then you can see the history): while :; do date; fping -e www.google.com www.yahoo.com www.kernel.org; sleep 1; done

The output is still ugly, and not everyone has fping installed either..

Here's a start if you want to produce decent looking output. Just give it a list of hosts as arguments.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX;

for(;;) {
    print strftime("%T:", localtime);
    foreach my $host (@ARGV) {
        my $a=`ping -c 1 $host`;
        my $latency;
        if($a =~ /rtt.* =\s+([\d.]+)\//s) {
            $latency=$1;
        } else {
            $latency="(dropped)";
        }
        print "$host:$latency\t";
    }
    print "\n";
    sleep(1);
}

OTHER TIPS

How about:

watch 'ping -c 4 www.google.com; echo; ping -c 4 www.yahoo.com'

Gives result such as this:

Every 2.0s: ping -c 4 www.google.com; echo; ping -c 4 www.yahoo.com                                                                          Tue Apr  7 13:57:47 2009

PING www.l.google.com (74.125.39.105) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from fx-in-f105.google.com (74.125.39.105): icmp_seq=1 ttl=248 time=8.06 ms
64 bytes from fx-in-f105.google.com (74.125.39.105): icmp_seq=2 ttl=248 time=8.47 ms
64 bytes from fx-in-f105.google.com (74.125.39.105): icmp_seq=3 ttl=248 time=8.37 ms
64 bytes from fx-in-f105.google.com (74.125.39.105): icmp_seq=4 ttl=248 time=8.19 ms

--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 2999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 8.061/8.276/8.478/0.196 ms

PING www-real.wa1.b.yahoo.com (87.248.113.14) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from f1.us.www.vip.ird.yahoo.com (87.248.113.14): icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=43.3 ms
64 bytes from f1.us.www.vip.ird.yahoo.com (87.248.113.14): icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=44.3 ms
64 bytes from f1.us.www.vip.ird.yahoo.com (87.248.113.14): icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=42.4 ms
64 bytes from f1.us.www.vip.ird.yahoo.com (87.248.113.14): icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=43.0 ms

--- www-real.wa1.b.yahoo.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 2999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 42.422/43.277/44.301/0.728 ms

Do you need to subtract the ping times? Does it have to be side by side (a bit annoying)? What's your ideal output format?

You could do this using say perl/python/php/otherlang and time how long it takes to open a connection to say port 80 for instance. You can store this into a variable and then use this for mathematical analysis.

Something like this in psuedo-code:

$site1_start = get_timestamp();
$sock = opensocket($someAddress,$required_port);
if($sock) { $sock->close(); };
$site1_end = get_timestamp();
$site1_round_trip = $t2 - $t1

$site2_start = get_timestamp();
$sock = opensocket($someAddress);
if($sock) { $sock->close(); };
$site2_end = get_timestamp();
$site2_round_trip = $t2 - $t1

// now we can perform some stuff on the round trips
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