How to measure responsetime of a network?

Question

We can use Ping command to measure responsetime for network.But is it the pure responsetime of network or does it include processing time ?

Kindly help to resolve this issue.

Answer 1

That does indeed include processing time. Otherwise you'd be pretty close to the speed of light.

If your question is if the processing time on the pinged host is included too, yes it is but that should be only a small amount.

Answer 2

ping is so simple that processing time is very low compared to network time (provided you don't check a LAN with 1Gb Ethernet). Anyway, processing time is to be taken into account because actual network traffic also needs time to be processed.

Answer 3

"The network" wouldn't exist without processing time being spent. Nothing happens for free, routing, TTL handling, and upholding all the protocols of course requires processing time on all nodes touched by a given path through the network.

And in the case of 'ping', then yes there is some processing required by the target machine's IP stack to detect the incoming request, and create and send the proper response. But that time is probably more or less constant (assuming constant background load), and often very small when compared to the pure transmission delays.

You can test this out by pinging localhost, then hosts on a local network, and comparing the differences in response times, assuming your ping implementation reports them with high enough precision.