Does anyone know of a way to test latency to a server. I have a satellite connection, and am told latency can be as high as 0.5 seconds. Is there a utility that I can run to test what it actually is to any given server? My pings are outrageous, 500 to over 1000ms when I list the servers, but when I go into one I don't see any time difference while I spectate. I haven't tried to race online with it yet.

Latency is simply the time it takes to go from point A to point B and back (http://searchsmb.techtarget.co ... ,,sid44_gci212456,00.html); so ping is prefect.

ping -t <host>

will continually ping the host until you cancel the ping (although you might get an angry host if you do it too much).

500ms = .5 seconds.

And yes, that has been the issue with satellite service; poor latency. I dare say even a 56k modem connection will give you better latency than satellite service.

Quote from MARSH2a :

Does anyone know of a way to test latency to a server. I have a satellite connection, and am told latency can be as high as 0.5 seconds. Is there a utility that I can run to test what it actually is to any given server? My pings are outrageous, 500 to over 1000ms when I list the servers, but when I go into one I don't see any time difference while I spectate. I haven't tried to race online with it yet.

That's what I was afraid of. I also have a dial-up account, I just wanted to make sure.
Thanks Zolt

I previously had a satelite connection.

Only used it for general internet usage because of poor latency, you can't get around the fact that each packet is traveling more than 60,000km out into space

I used 56k dialup for LFS and then ISDN when I could get it. Incedently ISDN has the better latency than ADSL which I'm currently on.

http://www.speedtest.net/ will tell you a bunch of statistics for your connection, including latency.