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Troubleshooting Information

Last Update 24 days ago

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How to Perform a Ping Test

Connection Fluctuation Test

Tharinda Lasika

Last Update 24 days ago

Connection fluctuations are dreadful when doing or viewing webinars. If a tech support person requests a ping test, apart from Speedtest, which checks for bandwidth only, follow the instructions below.


A Ping test sends ICMP echo request packets from your computer to a target destination (like flowapp.com) to measure round-trip latency and detect packet loss. By default, operating systems send 4 packets and stop. Adding the -t flag tells the operating system to ping continuously until you manually stop it.


On Windows


Windows uses -t to trigger a continuous ping.
How to Start
  1. Press Win + R, type cmd, and press Enter (or search for Command Prompt in the Start menu).
  2. Type the following command and press Enter:
    ping flowapp.com -t
  3. Your terminal will begin displaying continuous response times from the server.
  4. If you see "Request Timeout," then your connection is having a problem. Check your router and contact your ISP to get help.
  6. Pause / View Statistics: Press Ctrl + Break (or Ctrl + Pause) to see intermediate stats without killing the command.
  7. Stop completely: Press Ctrl + C. The test will end, showing total packets sent, received, loss percentage, and round-trip times.

Example of a connection timeout

 

On macOS

On macOS, standard ping runs indefinitely by default, but using -t works differently: in Unix-like systems, -t sets a time-to-live limit or timeout, so you shouldn't use -t on Mac.
How to Start
  1. Press Cmd + Space, type Terminal, and press Enter.
  2. Type the plain ping command (without flags) and press Enter:
    ping flowapp.com
    (If you want to specify a continuous interval, just run the command as shown above and it will loop endlessly until stopped.)
How to Stop
  • Stop completely: Press Control + C (Note: Use the Control key, not the Command key). The process will stop and display the final summary statistics.

On Linux

Similar to macOS, Linux runs continuous ping requests by default. Adding -t on Linux is used to set the IP Time-To-Live (TTL) value rather than continuous pinging.
How to Start
  1. Open your terminal application (e.g., press Ctrl + Alt + T on Ubuntu).
  2. Type the standard command and press Enter:
    ping flowapp.com
  3. If you want to specify a set count of packets (e.g., 10 pings), you would instead use the -c flag:
    ping -c 10 flowapp.com
How to Stop
  • Stop completely: Press Ctrl + C. This interrupts the process immediately and outputs packet loss and timing statistics.
 

Once you collect the information, please contact tech support for further assistance.

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