How To Perform A Ping Test In Windows, Mac OS, And Linux

In this article, we will review some useful information about the ping command and how to perform a simple ping test.

Table of Contents

What Is A Ping?

Ping is a basic network administration utility (command), similar to traceroute, used to test the reach-ability of a host on an IP network. It works by sending an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to a specific IP or host address listens to the ICMP echo response and measures the time it takes for the reply to come back to the source.

It is helpful for troubleshooting accessibility or performance issues you may be having or simply a quick way to tell if a host is “up” or performing slowly or intermittently performing poorly. Our tech support may ask you to run a “ping” to your server and then send the results back so we can analyze them.

How To Perform A Ping Test In Windows

Windows 7 And Older

Click on the “Start” menu and type “cmd” into the search field (where it says “Search programs and files” or “Start search”).
Push the Enter key on your keyboard. A DOS prompt window will open up.
Type the following command in the command window and press ‘Enter’:

ping yourdmain.tld

(remember to replace yourdomain.tld with your actual domain name)

The output will look similar to the following:

$ ping -c 5 yourdomain.tld
PING yourdomain.tld (89.45.251.10): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=11.632 ms
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=11.726 ms
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=10.683 ms
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=9.674 ms
64 bytes from 89.45.251.10: icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=11.127 ms

--- yourdomain.tld statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 9.674/10.968/11.726/0.748 ms

If you noticed in the example above, we used the attribute “–c“. This limits the number of ping requests to 5.
The ping request by default is constantly recurring until the user presses CTRL + C, hence the utility of this attribute.

Windows 8.X And Newer

Use the search window, type command prompt and click on the Command Prompt result.
Type the following command in the command window and press ‘Enter’:

ping yourdmain.tld

(remember to replace yourdomain.tld with your actual domain name)

How To Perform A Ping Test In MAC OS

On Mac OS X, you will need to navigate to the Applications folder > Utilities > and then open the ‘Network Utility‘ application.
Once the Network Utility is running, click on the ‘Ping’ tab and specify a domain or IP address to check. The default of ‘Send only 10 pings’ will be fine.
Click on the ‘Ping’ button to start the ping test.

How To Perform A Ping Test In Linux

Open a Terminal window using Ctrl + Alt + T. Simply hold all three keys at the same time, and a terminal window will open.
In the new terminal window, type the following command and press ‘Enter’:

ping -t 10 yourdomain.tld

(remember to replace yourdomain.tld with your actual domain name)

In conclusion, the ping command is a wide-spread and easy-to-use tool. It can come in handy for quick host availability check. However, watch out for certain hosts that prohibit its use due to its vulnerability.

If you enjoyed this article, then you’ll love Zalvis's Cloud Hosting platform. Turbocharge your website and get 24/7 support from our veteran team. Our world-class hosting infrastructure focuses on auto-scaling, performance, and security. Let us show you the Zalvis difference! Check out our services.