Ever see the ping utility go insane?

[Ichinisan]

I know I have some old screen captures somewhere showing strangeness with the Windows XP ping utility, but I just observed this today with PING.EXE in Windows 7.

- Ctrl+Break: "Lost = 0"

(loses 2 packets)

- Ctrl+Break: "Lost = 3"

(ping a few more times)

- Ctrl+Break: "Lost = 2"



W...T...F...?


I guess it found one of the lost packets...

[2016-02-26 edit]

A better example:

"Lost 1" --> "Lost 0"

 

[drebo]

Maybe your second CTRL+Break was after the echo request was sent but before the reply was received.

 

[CZroe]

Maybe your second CTRL+Break was after the echo request was sent but before the reply was received.

If the info is intended to be useful then it would only make sense to print results for what was received within the TTL and what had not by the time the TTL expired. If the TTL had not yet expired then it isn't technically "lost" yet.

 

[drebo]

If the info is intended to be useful then it would only make since to print results for what was received within the TTL and what had not by the time the TTL expired. If the TTL had not yet expired then it isn't technically "lost" yet.

I understand, but if you look at the numbers, it's simply a "Request Sent" and "Reply Received" counter and loss is calculated as the difference between thsoe two. It's nothing special, and the default timeout is 2 seconds.

More likely than an addition/subtraction bug in the ping utility, it's prboably just still waiting on one of those packets.

 

[Ichinisan]

Added a new example.

I understand, but if you look at the numbers, it's simply a "Request Sent" and "Reply Received" counter and loss is calculated as the difference between thsoe two. It's nothing special, and the default timeout is 2 seconds.

More likely than an addition/subtraction bug in the ping utility, it's prboably just still waiting on one of those packets.

Yeah. I wish they had coded it differently. Maybe it can wait to respond to Ctrl+Break until after the pending ping times-out or gets a reply (if that's possible). Or, it could ignore the pending ping entirely in the stats. Or, it could just show something like "Sent: 471, Received: 470, Lost: 0" to indicate that one is still pending.