Show HN: pff - Modern ping alternative to check your internet connection quality | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: pff - Modern ping alternative to check your internet connection quality

github.com

19 pointsyu3zhou411 comments

Hi, you can examine your internet connection quality and status in terminal using this small tool I created last year

See a preview on asciinema: https://asciinema.org/a/514331

I hope you find it useful. Thanks :)

Great job creating this!

Not taking anything at all away from what you've made, but a small personal and super pedantic gripe - I despise any time a software uses "I", as in, "I'm examining your connection". It is a piece of code, not a person, it is not an "I".

Thanks for your feedback. At the time of writing the code I played with an idea of software referring to the user as they both were people. I wonder if dislike towards this is pattern more common, if it does I will consider changing it

Also I wonder how this sentiment will change over a time, when LLMs become more common in our lives

This tool looks cool. Good job!

Usually when I'm debugging someones connection its because of problems in video calls. Sometimes people have very fast connections but large and erratic lag. This is frequently caused by buffer bloat and I found DSLReports buffer bloat grade to be the best at pin pointing it.

In other words, ping, fast.com, etc are insufficient to diagnose connection quality issues for lag sensitive use-cases like video calls. Or so I've found.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

My go-to tool for ping & packet loss check is https://packetlosstest.com/

fast.com has been my go to tool for this. But good work as this can be done from the terminal

fast.com is great because it’s Netflix-backed and is subject to all the same ISP throttling which makes it very easy to call your ISP out.

What does an unsuccesful ping return? Or various states inbetween?

Depending on average response time you will see different indicator text and colors, for example for average ping between 0.5 and 1s you will see “bad” quality marked with red color. All states are:

- excellent: less than 25ms

- good: 25-100ms

- average: 100-500ms

- bad: 500-1000ms

- really bad: over 1000ms

You will be also notified about how many requests failed, so you know that you have stability issues

What is it pinging? The README would ideally explain what it pings and also the brackets above.

I live in Australia. 100-300ms is normal for me unless the thing is also hosted in Australia. So that matters :)

Good point. It resolves the IP of cloudflare.com:443 and then pings it

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