What is ping, and what is a good ping for gaming?
Ping is the number that decides whether your shots register on time. It is also one of the most misunderstood figures in networking, so here is what it measures, what the values mean and what you can do about a high one.
In this guide
Ping is the time a small packet takes to travel from your device to a server and back, measured in milliseconds (ms). Lower is better. Under 20 ms is excellent, 20 to 50 ms is good for any online game, 50 to 100 ms is playable with occasional delay, and above 100 ms competitive shooters and fighting games start to feel unresponsive. Distance to the server sets the minimum; Wi-Fi, congestion and a busy connection add the rest.
What ping actually measures
The word comes from sonar: send a pulse, time the echo. The original ping program, written in 1983, sends an ICMP echo request to an address and times the echo reply. The number it reports is round-trip time, or latency: not how fast data moves, but how long a message waits for an answer.
Three things set that time:
- Distance. Light in fiber covers roughly 200 km per millisecond, so a server 2,000 km away costs about 20 ms for the round trip before any equipment is involved. Nothing on your side can reduce this; only a closer server can.
- Hops. Every router along the path adds a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds. A traceroute shows how many there are and where the time goes.
- Queuing. When a link is busy, packets wait in line. This is where almost all of the variable part of ping comes from: Wi-Fi contention, a saturated upload, a congested ISP link. It is also the part you can fix.
Ping and bandwidth are independent: a 1 Gbps fiber line to another continent still has 150 ms ping, and a 50 Mbps cable line to the next city can have 10 ms. Games send tiny packets, so latency matters far more than speed.
What is a good ping?
| Ping | How it feels | Good enough for |
|---|---|---|
| Under 20 ms | Instant; indistinguishable from a LAN | Everything, including competitive shooters and fighting games at a high level |
| 20–50 ms | Responsive; no perceptible delay | All online games; the normal range on a wired connection to a server in your region |
| 50–100 ms | Slight delay on quick actions; peeking and dodging feel a step late | Most games; shooters playable but at a disadvantage against low-ping opponents |
| 100–150 ms | Noticeable lag; hit registration and rollback effects | Co-op, MMOs, strategy and turn-based games |
| Over 150 ms | Actions visibly delayed; rubber-banding | Only games that tolerate delay; many matchmaking systems exclude you |
Genre changes the threshold. Fighting games and rhythm games are the most sensitive because timing windows are a few frames wide; many use rollback netcode that hides up to a few frames of delay and then degrades sharply. Shooters tolerate up to about 50 ms before you feel it. MOBAs and MMOs are comfortable to around 100 ms, and anything turn-based barely cares.
Stability matters as much as the average: a steady 40 ms beats a ping that swings between 15 and 90 ms, because the game's prediction keeps being wrong. That variation is jitter, covered below.
Test your ping
The ping test on this site measures round-trip time from your browser to our server, repeats it many times and reports the minimum, average, maximum and jitter. Because browsers cannot send ICMP, it uses a WebSocket round trip instead, which includes a little more overhead than the command-line tool but reflects what a web app or game launcher actually experiences. A few readings to know how to interpret:
- Minimum is your distance-and-hops floor. If the minimum is 8 ms and the average is 45 ms, the problem is queuing on your side, not the route.
- Average is what most games display as "ping".
- Maximum and jitter tell you how unstable the link is. A maximum several times the minimum on a wired connection usually means bufferbloat: your router is letting one busy device queue up everyone else's packets.
For the full picture, the connection quality test measures ping under load, packet loss and bufferbloat together and grades the result. To see where along the route the time is added, run a traceroute to the game server's address.
The ping command on Windows and macOS
The command-line tool is still the quickest way to measure ping to any specific host, such as a game server, your router or a public resolver.
Windows 11
- Press Win+R, type
cmdand press Enter (or open Terminal). - Type
ping 1.1.1.1and press Enter. Windows sends four requests and printstime=12msfor each, then minimum, maximum and average. - For a longer sample use
ping -n 50 1.1.1.1; for a continuous test useping -t 1.1.1.1and press Ctrl+C to stop and show the statistics.
macOS and Linux
- Open Terminal.
- Type
ping -c 50 1.1.1.1and press Enter. Unix pings run until stopped unless you give a count, so-c 50sends fifty and then printsround-trip min/avg/max/stddev. Without a count, Ctrl+C ends the test and prints the summary.
Ping your router first (usually 192.168.1.1; our guide shows how to find your router's IP address). Over Ethernet it should answer in under 1 ms; over Wi-Fi, 2 to 10 ms is normal. If the router itself is slow or erratic, nothing beyond it can be fast. Request timed out lines mean lost packets, which is a separate problem from high ping. Some hosts block ICMP entirely, so a timeout to one address does not prove the route is broken.
How to reduce ping
In order of how much difference each one typically makes:
- Pick the nearest server region. Most games let you choose or show the ping per region in the server browser. This is the only fix for the distance component, and it is often worth 50 ms or more.
- Use an Ethernet cable. Wi-Fi adds latency and, worse, jitter, because every device on the channel takes turns and retransmits on interference. A cable to the router typically removes 5 to 30 ms of variability. Powerline adapters are a middle ground; a mesh system's wired backhaul is better.
- Stop competing traffic. A cloud backup, a console downloading an update or someone streaming 4K upstairs fills the queue your packets wait in. Pause uploads in particular: a saturated upload link is the classic cause of ping jumping from 20 to 200 ms.
- Turn on QoS or SQM on the router. Quality-of-service settings let the router prioritize game traffic or, better, keep queues short for everyone (look for "SQM", "Smart Queue", "fq_codel" or "cake"). This is the fix for bufferbloat and makes ping stable under load even if it does not lower the minimum.
- If you must use Wi-Fi, use the 5 GHz or 6 GHz band, sit within line of sight of the router and move it off the floor and away from the TV. Our router buying guide explains which features matter for latency.
- Check for a bad route. If the ping to a nearby server is high while the ping to your router is fine, a traceroute shows the hop where the time jumps. Occasionally a VPN exiting near the game server takes a shorter path; usually it adds latency. Test both.
- Restart the router occasionally and update its firmware; years-old firmware is a common cause of creeping latency.
Things that do not reduce ping: changing DNS servers (DNS only affects the first lookup, not game traffic), "gaming" VPN products that cannot shorten the physical route, and buying more bandwidth when the problem is queuing rather than speed.
Ping vs jitter vs packet loss
Games stutter for three different reasons that are easy to confuse:
| Measure | What it is | What it feels like | Typical cause |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ping (latency) | Average round-trip time | Everything happens a fixed moment late | Distance, route, slow link |
| Jitter | How much the round-trip time varies between packets | Stutter, rubber-banding, hits that register inconsistently | Wi-Fi, congestion, bufferbloat |
| Packet loss | Percentage of packets that never arrive | Freezes, teleporting players, disconnects | Bad cable, weak Wi-Fi, overloaded link, faulty equipment |
A game can be smooth at 80 ms with zero jitter and unplayable at 30 ms with 2% loss. If your ping is fine but the game still stutters, measure the other two: the connection quality test reports all three, and our packet loss guide covers how to find and fix the lost packets.
Questions
What does a high ping mean?
It means the round trip between you and the server is taking a long time, usually over 100 ms, so every action you take arrives late and every update from the server reaches you late. The cause is either distance (a server far away), a congested or unstable link on your side, or a poor route. Compare the ping to your router with the ping to the server to see which half of the path is responsible.
Is 30 ping good?
Yes. At 30 ms the delay is a fraction of a frame at 60 frames per second and below what most people can perceive. It is a typical result on a wired connection to a server in your own region, and good enough for competitive play in any genre. If your game feels laggy at 30 ms, the problem is almost certainly jitter or packet loss rather than the average ping, so test those next.
How do I use the ping command in Windows?
Open a Command Prompt or Terminal window, type ping followed by an address or hostname, for example ping 1.1.1.1, and press Enter. Windows sends four echo requests and prints the time for each plus the minimum, maximum and average. Add -n 50 to send fifty requests for a better sample, or -t to ping continuously; press Ctrl+C to stop and see the statistics. Request timed out means a packet was lost.
What does "please ping me" mean?
In everyday speech it just means "send me a quick message" or "remind me", borrowed from the network tool's idea of a short check-in that expects a reply. In chat apps like Slack and Discord it often means mentioning someone with @ so they get a notification. It has nothing to do with latency, although the metaphor is the same: a brief signal sent out to get a response.
Does a VPN lower ping?
Usually it raises it, because traffic takes a detour through the VPN server and is encrypted on the way. It can lower ping in one situation: when your ISP's route to a game server is poor and the VPN's exit is close to that server with a better path. The only way to know is to measure ping to the same server with the VPN on and off; a product marketed as a gaming VPN rarely beats a direct route.
Why is my ping high only sometimes?
Intermittent spikes point to queuing rather than distance. Common triggers are another device uploading or downloading, a cloud backup or game update running in the background, Wi-Fi interference from neighbors or microwaves, and bufferbloat in the router. Run a ping test while the connection is idle and again while something large is uploading; if the figure jumps, enable QoS or SQM on the router and move the gaming device to Ethernet.