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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

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

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).

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

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

https://github.com/apenwarr/blip

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

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

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."

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

Love it

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