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Why are pings to bbc.co.uk faster than to ntp.plus.net

jafreer
Aspiring Pro
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Registered: ‎13-10-2012

Why are pings to bbc.co.uk faster than to ntp.plus.net

As the title says, pings to bbc.co.uk are around 18ms, and to ntp.plus.net about 21ms.
Just would have thought that the ping to plusnet would have been the faster of the two?
5 REPLIES 5
Mustrum
Community Veteran
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Re: Why are pings to bbc.co.uk faster than to ntp.plus.net

Its the other way round for me, 18ms for BBC, 11 to ntp.
Andrue
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Re: Why are pings to bbc.co.uk faster than to ntp.plus.net

Ping times depend on two things. Speed of network and speed of responder. ntp.plus.net should have a faster network for all of us but if the server is some manky old cast-off (quite possible for an ISP's time server(*)) then it may be sluggish. Conversely the BBC has edge routers that handle a lot of traffic and will probably be some of the best hardware on the 'net. They will respond faster than a whippet up a drain pipe unless they are very busy. Routers often de-prioritise pings in favour of other traffic so it could also be that the route your packet happened to take was a bit busy and your request and/or the response got held up somewhere.
Frankly a difference of 3ms is nothing. It could have been that a rat farted as your signal raced past Smiley
(*)You might think a time server needs to be fast responding but it doesn't really. The protocol is designed to mitigate such effects so as long as it doesn't take a ridiculous time to respond it's all good.
jafreer
Aspiring Pro
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Registered: ‎13-10-2012

Re: Why are pings to bbc.co.uk faster than to ntp.plus.net

Thanks Andrue for a very concise answer. I hadn't really thought about the response time of the server hardware itself, but makes sense.
The ping times are not an issue, I was just curious as the times seemed counter intuitive.
ejs
Aspiring Hero
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Registered: ‎10-06-2010

Re: Why are pings to bbc.co.uk faster than to ntp.plus.net

ntp.plus.net isn't just a time server though, it's Plusnet's DNS servers (or at least a load balancer in front of them).
Andrue
Pro
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Registered: ‎12-01-2015

Re: Why are pings to bbc.co.uk faster than to ntp.plus.net

Ah. In that case rather than being crappy hardware it's probably just busy hardware. It has more important things to do than respond to pings  Grin
mav:quote