Ping Test: Checking Host Reachability and Latency

What Ping Does

Ping sends RFC 792 ICMP Echo Request packets to a target host and measures the time it takes for each Echo Reply to come back. This round-trip time (RTT) tells you two things: whether the host is reachable, and how much latency exists on the network path between the source and destination.

The mxio Ping tool runs the test from our infrastructure, so the RTT you see reflects latency from our servers to the target — useful for understanding how the target performs from an external perspective, not from your local machine.

Reading the Results

Round-Trip Time (RTT)

RTT is measured in milliseconds. Typical values depend on geographic distance and network quality:

Consistency matters as much as raw numbers. Stable RTT with low variance means a clean path. Wildly fluctuating RTT (jitter) suggests congestion or routing instability.

Packet Loss

Packet loss means some Echo Requests never received a reply. Any loss above 0% is worth investigating. Occasional single-packet drops can be normal under load, but sustained loss above 1-2% degrades performance for TCP-based services (web, email, API calls) because lost packets trigger retransmissions and backoff.

Limitations

Not all hosts respond to ICMP. Many firewalls and cloud providers block ping traffic by default. A host that does not respond to ping is not necessarily down — it may simply drop ICMP packets. AWS EC2 instances, for example, block ICMP unless explicitly allowed in their security group.

Ping also does not tell you which hop in the network path is causing latency or loss. For that, use traceroute.

When to Use Ping vs. Traceroute

Ping answers: "Is this host reachable, and how fast?" Traceroute answers: "Where in the network path is the problem?" Start with ping to confirm reachability and measure baseline latency. If you see high latency or packet loss, follow up with traceroute to identify the specific hop causing the issue.

For DNS resolution issues — where the domain does not resolve at all — start with an A Lookup to verify the domain has valid address records before testing reachability.

Run a ping test on any host