Measuring ping latency of a server - Python

Question

Hi folks,

I have a list of server IP addresses, I need to check if each one is online and how long the latency is.

I haven't found any straight forward ways of implementing this, and there seems to be a few problems in calculating latency accurately.

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Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you want to avoid implementing all the network communication details you could probably try to build something on top of fping:

fping is a like program which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a target host is responding. fping differs from ping in that you can specify any number of targets on the command line, or specify a file containing the lists of targets to ping. Instead of sending to one target until it times out or replies, fping will send out a ping packet and move on to the next target in a round-robin fashion.

Answer 2

If you are already comfortable with parsing strings, you can use the subprocess module to get the data you are looking for into a string, like this:

>>> import subprocess
>>> p = subprocess.Popen(["ping.exe","www.google.com"], stdout = subprocess.PIPE)
>>> print p.communicate()[0]

Pinging www.l.google.com [209.85.225.99] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.85.225.99: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.85.225.99: bytes=32 time=64ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.85.225.99: bytes=32 time=104ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.85.225.99: bytes=32 time=64ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 209.85.225.99:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 59ms, Maximum = 104ms, Average = 72ms