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I want to display my avg latency time for whatever connection I currently have to the internet in a widget. Would having ping run continuously make my connection suffer?

Elijah Lynn
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    Lets assume a typical ping packet and reply is 84 bytes each, and you are pinging once a second. That is 2 * 86,400 * 84 bytes or about 13 megabytes of traffic per day. Or about ~1.2kilobit/s. So unless you are running on a 9600 baud modem, you probably can handle it. – Zoredache Jul 30 '13 at 22:17
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    Bandwidth utilization and latency are two very different things. Can your ping affect the latency of the connection? Most definitely not. Can your ping affect the bandwidth utilization so as to "slow down" the transit of other traffic? Probably not. – joeqwerty Jul 31 '13 at 00:10
  • Thanks guys, this is very helpful! I didn't realize novice questions were off-topic. Thanks for your feedback anyways! – Elijah Lynn Jul 31 '13 at 19:44

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I've had to monitor the stability of my connection for months at a time with a ping running constantly. If you are using a default packet size, it should have just about zero effect on the rest of your internet traffic, even on a slow connection.

Jeremy Lyons
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