Real-time ping and network latency test with a live graph
Latency — commonly called "ping" — is the time it takes a small packet of data to travel from your device to a server and back, measured in milliseconds. It has been a core network diagnostic since the earliest days of the internet, when the `ping` command-line tool was created to check whether a remote host was reachable and how long a round trip took. Today the same idea matters most to people playing online games, video-calling or trading, where even small delays are immediately noticeable.
In fast-paced competitive shooters like Fortnite or Counter-Strike 2, latency directly affects how quickly an action on your screen — a shot, a jump, a build — reaches the game server and registers for other players. A connection under roughly 50 ms generally feels instant, 50–100 ms is still playable for most genres, and anything above 100–150 ms starts to introduce visible lag, delayed hit registration and rubber-banding. Jitter, the variation between consecutive ping times, matters almost as much as the average: a steady 80 ms connection often feels smoother than one that swings between 20 ms and 150 ms.
Latency depends on physical distance to the server, the number of network hops in between, congestion on your local Wi-Fi or router, and the quality of your ISP's routing — which is why the same connection can show very different numbers to different destinations. Watching a live graph over time, rather than a single ping, makes it much easier to spot an unstable connection, a Wi-Fi dead zone or a background download eating bandwidth before it ruins a match.