Ping
Ping is the round-trip time in milliseconds for a packet to travel from your device to the game server and back.
3 min readReviewed Jul 2026TTML Editorial
Also known as LatencyAlso known as RTT
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Definition
In depth
Ping — or more precisely round-trip time (RTT) — is the single most important latency metric for online gaming. It measures how long the network takes to acknowledge one small packet, expressed in milliseconds.
Ping is a physical constraint first and a routing problem second. The speed of light through fibre puts a hard floor on how low your ping can go for a given distance; no product can beat that floor. What can be improved is the extra time added by suboptimal routing, congestion or wireless overhead.
Deep dives
Guides that use Ping
Related terms
See also
- JitterJitter is the short-term variation of your ping — the difference between one round-trip time and the next.
- Packet LossPacket loss is the percentage of network packets that never reach the destination within the expected window.
- Round-Trip Time (RTT)Round-trip time is the total time for a packet to travel to a destination and for its acknowledgement to return.
- Tick RateTick rate is how many times per second a game server samples the world and sends updates — measured in Hz.
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