The future of Wifi

Send your pings to pingcatcher.com

Send your pings to pingcatcher.com

Send your pings to pingcatcher.com

pingcatcher.com displays beautiful charts of your pings so you can view them like a human.

$ ping google.com | nc pingcatcher.com 88

Awesome! Now visit pingcatcher.com for a real-time chart of this ping.

PING google.com (172.217.8.78): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 172.217.8.78: icmp_seq=0 ttl=114 time=3.073 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.8.78: icmp_seq=1 ttl=114 time=2.619 ms

Here’s what your pings looks like on pingcatcher.com:

See timeouts, latency, history and more

Ping as many locations as you like

Use TCP for accurate ping latency

How does this work exactly?

Why did we build pingcatcher.com?

We spend a lot of time monitoring Wifi and internet connections.

If you’ve got a continuous ping running on the command line (who doesn’t?), it’s only useful if you’re staring at it while it’s running.

$ ping google.com
PING google.com (172.217.8.78): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 172.217.8.78: icmp_seq=0 ttl=114 time=3.073 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.8.78: icmp_seq=1 ttl=114 time=2.619 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.8.78: icmp_seq=2 ttl=114 time=3.851 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.8.78: icmp_seq=3 ttl=114 time=2.859 ms

Plus this outupt is so 1983. There’s now easy way to see latency spikes or timeout history. What to know what happened to your connection an hour ago, you can forget about it :)

Two pings are better that one

We’re usually pinging multiple locations to understand where packet loss or latency is comming from. Let’s also ping our router.

$ ping 192.168.1.1 | nc pingcatcher.com 88

Visit pingcatcher.com:

Use TCP for accurate ping latency

Ping (ICMP) isn’t a great tool for latency measurement because network devices deprioritize it below real traffic.

The better tool for measuring latency is TCP, specifically TCP SYN packets.

$ sudo hping -S -p 53 8.8.8.8
HPING 8.8.8.8 (en0 8.8.8.8): S set, 40 headers + 0 data bytes
len=46 ip=8.8.8.8 ttl=118 id=31357 sport=53 flags=SA seq=0 win=65535 rtt=13.3 ms
len=46 ip=8.8.8.8 ttl=118 id=31950 sport=53 flags=SA seq=1 win=65535 rtt=22.3 ms
len=46 ip=8.8.8.8 ttl=119 id=58933 sport=53 flags=SA seq=2 win=65535 rtt=21.7 ms
len=46 ip=8.8.8.8 ttl=119 id=42422 sport=53 flags=SA seq=3 win=65535 rtt=39.6 ms