PC Pitstop Ping Test

This page tests the connection between your computer and several sites on the Internet. For each site, we report some statistics about the round-trip time (RTT) between your computer and the site. The RTT is the time in milliseconds for a "ping" packet to travel from your computer to the site and back again. This number can vary significantly because of the random nature of Internet packet routings and because of random loads on all the computers that handle each packet.

The test starts automatically when you open this page, and takes about one minute to complete. You may exit it at any time by going to another page. To start over, press your browser's refresh/reload button.

Are you getting errors or no results? See About Ping Test. In particular, these points are important:

• Software and hardware firewalls can block ping packets.
• Some ISPs will discard ping packets within their networks.
• High ping times (> 1000 ms) are normal for satellite connections.
• These are US sites; users outside the US may have high ping times.
• There are no "tweaks" for your PC that improve ping times.
• The page uses ActiveX and requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher.

Interpreting Your Results

Pinpointing a Problem/Testing Other Sites

You can test your connection to other sites using the command-line Ping utility on your computer. You can find out where the problem is in the connection to any given site using the command-line Traceroute or Tracert utility:

To ping www.pcpitstop.com:

• Open a command prompt (Start | Programs | MS Dos Prompt). (See more instructions)
• At the C:\ command prompt type
  ping www.pcpitstop.com
  and press Enter.
• This will give you a low, high, and average RTT value. You can test any URL this way.

To trace the route from your computer to www.pcpitstop.com:

• Click Start | Programs | MS Dos Prompt.
• At the C:\ command prompt type:
  tracert www.pcpitstop.com
  and press Enter.
• You will then see a list of all the routers between your computer and the one you specified, along with three sample RTTs for each router. You can sometimes identify a problem with your connection by finding one router (or "hop") that has much higher RTTs than the hop before it. If your response times are slow and the connection is consistently timing out somewhere along the route, you may want to notify your ISP.