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by nertzy 322 days ago
I am still a Yahoo! pinger as well.

  ~  ping yahoo.com
  PING yahoo.com (74.6.231.20): 56 data bytes
  64 bytes from 74.6.231.20: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=42.366 ms
  ^C
  --- yahoo.com ping statistics ---
  1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
  round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 42.366/42.366/42.366/0.000 ms
3 comments

Shortest, fastest?

    ping 1.1
What do you mean by "safest"? How is pinging 1.0.0.1 safer that yahoo.com? With pinging 1.1 you exclude DNS from your chain, but is that safer anyhow?
You mis-read me. I said 'shortest'.
Oops
I just tried, pinging Yahoo is about 20 times slower than pinging Google...
I decided to run a small experiment

ping -c 20 -i 5 google.com; ping -c 20 -i 5 yahoo.com [snip] --- google.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.746/19.939/25.057/3.153 ms [snip] --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 14.561/20.883/25.080/2.675 ms

They look comparable to me?

It would depend on where you are pinging from and if they have anything closer to you to respond.

From where I am, google averages 4ms, yahoo is at 200ms+. Obviously because they dont have the money or marketshare to bother putting anything for me to route closer too.

Same experiment from my gigabit link in Silicon Valley. Looks like Yahoo is about 3 times slower but far more consistent

--- google.com ping statistics ---

20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 6.918/23.419/294.037/62.272 ms

--- yahoo.com ping statistics ---

20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 78.056/78.940/80.940/0.811 ms

Although what's interesting is that Yahoo is really more like 10 times slower (almost every ping was in the 6-8ms range), it's just that there was just that one packet at 300ms and other at 30ms that really blew out the average.

It's a muscle memory now after 30 years of doing it. Always the first thing I ping when testing a connection.