How PING works

[maninder_singh.negi1]

Hello Folks,

I have one interesting query.

My wan link bandwidth is 1 Mbps.

I asked My vendor to ping one IP with size 1500 repeat 1000 and he said to me that if he made such ping then minimum wan

link bandwidth should be 2 Mbps else packet drop will happen.

I need to know why he made such statement ??

Kindly also let me know when i run command ping 1.1.1.1 size 1500 repeat 1000 then i am sending 1000 packets in one go

or i will wait for first packet echo reply and then i will send second packet.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Kindly also let me know when i run command ping 1.1.1.1 size 1500 repeat 1000 then i am sending 1000 packets in one go

or i will wait for first packet echo reply and then i will send second packet.

I'm not really sure.  I don't believe ping waits on results, for one reason, there might not be any to any one ping request, but I also believe ping doesn't send multiple requests as physically fast as it might.

I need to know why he made such statement ??

Well if he is assuming ping will send as quickly as it can, physically, then if the ping source device's egress interface is "faster" than the downstream bandwidth, it would indeed be possible for ping packets to be lost due to burst congestion.  If it waits a bit, between each packet it sends, as I think it might, ping packets might still be lost to congestion.  Larger packets sizes, and longer transmission sets, with either approach, may increase the chance of congestion packet loss.

However, when I use larger ping packet sizes (include maximum packet size [causing fragments]) with larger ping sets, I often do it for the very purpose to trying to load up the link/path.  In those cases, I may want to see if I can obtain any drops.