I know this is a silly question, but I can't for the life of me find a clear sentence on the internet that says "ping is the time it takes to ..." so I have to ask here: Is ping the time it takes to send data from client to server, or client to server and back to client? I'm pretty sure it's the latter, but if my game tells you that your ping is half or double what it really is, that's a big problem. I want to be safe.

Round trip. If you are running Windows, open the command prompt, type "ping google.com" and read what it outputs.

If you are running Windows, open the command prompt, type "ping google.com" and read what it outputs.

And if you're running Linux or some flavour of UNIX (including OSX), do the same .

If you are running Windows, open the command prompt, type "ping google.com" and read what it outputs.

And if you're running Linux or some flavour of UNIX (including OSX), do the same .

Yeah, I didn't have Linux up to test it.

but I can't for the life of me find a clear sentence on the internet that says "ping is the time it takes to ..."

"In the process it measures the time from transmission to reception (round-trip time)[1] and records any packet loss."

(i)You knock on your neighbors wall...

(ii)Your neighbor knocks back...

(iii)The 'ping time' is the time it takes for step (i) and step (ii) combined.

it should be called pong >_>

If I remember correctly, in IRC a ping response is called a pong.

I do believe you are correct in that the ping response is a pong, not just in IRC.

If I remember correctly, in IRC a ping response is called a pong.

In Erlang, a ping request to an existing node will return 'pong'. A ping request to a node that is down instead returns 'pang'. (Which is funny because you usually feel a pang when you realize something's missing :-)

It should be noted that in it's "kind of official" meaning, ping refers to ICMP ping, not something you send as normal data. Technically, this is just an IP datagram which uses a different internet layer protocol (instead of e.g. TCP or UDP).

Practically, this matters because not few cheap hosters will cheat and give ICMP (and in particular ping) higher priorities in their routers. Which means that the machines appear to have a better reachability than they have in reality. So you might wonder why it takes forever for your server to reply, but when you type ping yourserver into a command prompt, everything looks just fine. Thus, since it is "obviously" not the network, you waste hours trying to figure what's wrong on your server. Bah.

And with that lesson learned, you'll always implement your own ping or stay away from cheap hosters