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Why another PING utility?

Many PING utilities are already available, one is even released with Windows itself, called PING. But there is a couple of things Windows PING doesn't offer or which are too inaccurate. That's where hrPING comes in.

So - what's the features?

Like every PING, hrPING sends "ICMP Echo Request" packets to the remote computer and listens to the matching "Echo response" packets.

The first thing that is different is that hrPING times the round trip delay in microseconds. This is done by using the CPU's "Time Stamp Counter" which is incremented with the CPU's clock cycle. You can not get any more accurate with standard PCs today!

The next thing Windows PING can not do is send more than one PING packet at a time. Windows PING always sends one packet, waits for the reply, then prints its output line, repeat.

hrPING sends out one PING packet every x milliseconds (you can adjust this time with the -s parameter) while listening for incoming replies and printing the output if there is any.

The reason why you should like this is easy: with DSL or the like you often have a delay of some 40 msec, while the upstream bandwidth of the whole connection is some 16 to 20 kbytes/sec. So, with a "standard" PING packet of 20+8+64 bytes (IP header + ICMP header + PING payload) you can send 7 packets before you get the first reply. If you want to test line conditions, thruput, etc. this "overlapped" way of sending is really helpful.

What's more, hrPING has much better statistics than Windows PING. You get the round trip times for ICMP error message replies as well! This way you can e.g. monitor the delay of a TTL exceed. hrPING counts the replies and error messages separately, so the global statistics don't mess up one another.

There's a lot more goodies hidden in hrPING , just use it and you will find out about small but useful features.