

Cloud Ping - mleonhard
http://www.awsping.com/

======
dadro
Just an FYI. To the best of my knowledge Amazon does not permit the use of
their trademarked services within the domain of the URL. I'm working on a
project that augments EC2 and ended up having to change my domain name to err
on the side of caution.

IANAL but do checkout <http://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/> and read
section 9 and section 11.

~~~
mleonhard
Thanks for pointing this out. I just renamed the site to cloudping.info.

Would pg or another admin be so kind as to change the URL to
<http://www.cloudping.info/> ?

~~~
delano
You should be able to do a URL redirect from <http://awsping.com/> to
<http://www.cloudping.info/> for now.

Cool tool btw!

~~~
mleonhard
Thanks! Redirect added.

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mleonhard
I originally wrote the HTTP ping tool for this blog entry:
[http://blog.restbackup.com/how-to-use-amazon-ec2-as-your-
des...](http://blog.restbackup.com/how-to-use-amazon-ec2-as-your-desktop)

But Posterous doesn't allow JavaScript, so I had to cut it out. Today I
decided to put it online and try out several technologies:

    
    
      * My DNS Registrar's domain forwarding feature, to forward
        http://awsping.com/ to http://www.awsping.com/
      * Amazon S3's new index document feature
      * Amazon CloudFront
    

I'm happy to say that they all work great. But the ping script doesn't work in
Opera.

~~~
garyrichardson
This is a pretty awesome tool.

You should consider recording everyone's times + their IP/Location. Displaying
that information would be very cool.

~~~
tybris
You can sort of get that from: <http://www.cloudelay.com/cdn-cloudfront.htm>

There doesn't seem to be any information on how the map is generated
unfortunately. I suppose DUB2 is Ireland, NRT4 Japan, SIN2 Singapore, IAD2
Virginia, and SFO4/LAX1 California.

~~~
stoked
The locations are based on airport codes.

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jread
I just created a very similar http-based ping based on this, but with the
following difference:

* Use JSON-P to avoid same-origin-policy request failures (this also fixed the Opera failures) * Repeat request 6 times (1 warmup + 5 measured) and display mean, median, min and max latency measurements * Allow ping against 40 different provides including 4 AWS regions

<http://cloudharmony.com/ping>

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bensummers
This is really very interesting.

My best ping time is 41ms to the Europe region. But a typical ping to our colo
servers is 18ms. AWS isn't a high performance option.

~~~
garyrichardson
Unless all of your users are working from your desk, you're 'typical ping' is
worthless.

This ping tool would be far more valuable if you could see the ping times from
different clients over time. Then you could actually make a judgement call if
AWS is or isn't a high performance option.

~~~
bensummers
Sorry, my phrasing was unclear. My AWS ping time is from my desk, the "typical
ping" to our colo is from anywhere in the south of the UK where all our
clients are.

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gauravgupta
Since you'll probably run these tests several times to get a true picture,
it'll be helpful if the previous results are not over-written in the UI when
the tests are run again.

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jread
This is great, very close approximation to actual latency. We had a similar
need on our cloud speedtest <http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest> and
implemented using a Java applet that executed and screenscraped an OS ping to
capture latency. We've been wanting to replace this with a less intrusive
javascript approach.

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PanMan
It seems the tool is broken. In Europe, I get 6 ms to Ireland, but 1 ms to
asia. I have been pinging my nearest hop, and I get 100-300 ms, with a lot of
packet loss. I'm on really flaky wifi, and I think your ping returns 0ms when
no result?

~~~
mleonhard
Yeah, some failures are not detected as failures. When failures happen
instantly, you get impossibly low timings.

Please feel free to play around with the source code and see if you can
improve it. I'd be glad to merge your diff.

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mike4u2
Nice tool! It is the perfect addition to this AWS load time test:
<http://www.alertfox.com/Tools/LoadTime/>

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davidcann
This is great. It would also be nice to see ping time to S3 vs CloudFront.

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tybris
of similar nature (for CloudFront locations): <http://www.cloudelay.com/cdn-
cloudfront.htm>

