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Does anyone know of a free ping flood (some people call it flood ping) utility for Windows? I want something portable that I can install anywhere. I use ping flooding to primarily test for packet loss and jitter, and find the native tools on Windows to be rather frustrating and sometimes they're the only tools available to test end-to-end connectivity.

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3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Have you considered using something like iperf instead? If you use the UDP test it will report packet loss and jitter for you already. Iperf binaries exist for many platforms including windows. The windows binary runs on any recent windows, and doesn't require installation.

Usually people are interested in jitter because they they have VoIP going. Almost all VoIP systems use UDP for the data. So doing a test using a UDP is more likely to give you real results.

Here is some example output.

 iperf -c 10.2.4.1 -u
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.2.4.1, UDP port 5001
Sending 1470 byte datagrams
UDP buffer size:   122 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.2.4.244 port 32955 connected with 10.2.4.1 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.25 MBytes  1.05 Mbits/sec
[  3] Sent 893 datagrams
[  3] Server Report:
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth       Jitter   Lost/Total Datagrams
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.25 MBytes  1.05 Mbits/sec  0.364 ms    0/  892 (0%)
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  1 datagrams received out-of-order
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There's also a frontend for iperf, xjperf (code.google.com/p/xjperf ) that i find really easy to use – Florent Courtay Sep 7 '10 at 7:10
Thanks for the information, unfortunately I need something generic such as ping, because I will be testing from the actual server across the Internet to multiple sites, which may or may not have UDP open. – snap Sep 8 '10 at 15:33
ICMP is just as likely to be blocked on the firewall. It is also very likely to be traffic shaped. Meaning an ICMP based test may not reveal useful information. – Zoredache Sep 8 '10 at 16:35
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up vote 3 down vote

A ping flood is a DOS attack. ping -t *<ipaddress>* is a appropriate way to do end to end connectivity test that is continuous until stopped.

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I am glad you neglected to post such DoS type utils here... but I would also like to say that there are legitimate reasons to use those tools. I frequently use such tools against various parts of my network to try & find the points of failure before someone else shows me. – TheCompWiz Sep 1 '10 at 21:07
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The 1 second interval between pings is not very useful when you are trying to test VoIP. Since he mentions jitter it seems seems obvious he is looking to test something more then just connectivity over time. – Zoredache Sep 1 '10 at 21:44
I answerdd the question. If the question was "I want to measure jitter" I would have reccomended smokeping. I did not believe he was trying to measure voip since ping flooding would make it impossible to measure jitter or packet loss (as it would by definition cause both) – Jim B Sep 2 '10 at 1:25
A ping flood is a DOS attack from like 1995, these days it requires a heavily coordinated attack to bring down a normal broadband connection. ping -t is okay for jitter, but not so much for packet loss. I'm not too keen waiting 100 seconds for what can take 0.1 seconds with a flood ping utility. (There is a reason that almost every UNIX OS bundles a ping utility with the flood option.) – snap Sep 8 '10 at 15:32
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up vote -2 down vote

From my point of practice I can recommend you install some UNIX based system and you will have all you want to do in your hands. Not like this "uncle Bill" UNIX based but toolless platform if it can be called so.

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