Actually, using HTTP 1.1 GET  that generates a single packet in each direction 
for a ping is quite reasonable.  In fact, it is "better" for measuring actual 
path latencies, since ICMP pings *could* be discriminated against in a router 
along the way (in the "old days" people in the routing community suggested that 
ICMP should be diverted off of the "fast path" to avoid degrading the user 
experience).
 
I've been using this technique to measure bufferbloat-induced delays on Phones 
and Android phones for quite a while.  I have a couple of servers that use 
nginx "status" handlers to generate a short GET response without touching files 
as my "targets".
 
Since it depends on HTTP 1.1's re-use of the underlying TCP connection for 
successive GET commands, it's a bit fragile.
 
Javascript can be made to do a lot of performance testing - you can access both 
TCP and DNS protocols from the browser, so if you play cards right, you can 
cause single TCP exchanges and single UDP exchanges to happen with cooperative 
servers (web servers using HTTP 1.1 and DNS resolvers using uncacheable UDP 
name lookups).
 
 
 


On Sunday, April 28, 2013 10:56am, "Rich Brown" <[email protected]> said:



> This is indeed a cool hack. I was astonished for a moment, because it was a
> bedrock belief that you can't send pings from Javascript. And in fact, that is
> still true.
> 
> Apenwarr's code sends short HTTP queries of the format shown below to each of 
> two
> hosts:
> 
> http://gstatic.com/generate_204
> http://apenwarr.ca/blip/
> 
> The Blip tool shows ~60-70ms for the gstatic host, and ~130 msec for the 
> latter.
> Ping times are ~52 msec and 125msec, respectively. These times seem to track
> response times by my eye (no serious analysis) to load both on my primary
> (bloated) router and CeroWrt.
> 
> Still a cool hack.
> 
> Rich
> 
> -------------------------
> HTTP Request & Response for typical blip "ping"
> 
> OPTIONS /generate_204 HTTP/1.1
> Host: gstatic.com
> Connection: keep-alive
> Access-Control-Request-Method: GET
> Origin: http://gfblip.appspot.com
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_3) AppleWebKit/537.31
> (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.65 Safari/537.31
> Access-Control-Request-Headers: accept, origin, x-requested-with
> Accept: */*
> Referer: http://gfblip.appspot.com/
> Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
> Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
> Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
> 
> HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
> Content-Length: 0
> Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
> Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:37:17 GMT
> Server: GFE/2.0
> 
> 
> On Apr 26, 2013, at 7:04 PM, Dave Taht <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Apenwarr has developed a really unique tool for seeing latency and
> > packet loss via javascript. I had no idea this was possible:
> >
> > http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201304#26
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Dave Täht
> >
> > Fixing bufferbloat with cerowrt:
> http://www.teklibre.com/cerowrt/subscribe.html
> > _______________________________________________
> > Bloat mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
>
 
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