Ping server survey
Everyone seems to be pinging everyone else these days, so I thought it would be interesting to do a bit of a survey so see how these ping relay services perform. I’m talking about services like Ping-o-matic and Pingoat.
If you don’t know what pinging is (in the blog sense), then take a look here (geeks look here). Essentially, it is a means for a blog to tell any interested parties that it has been updated, and if you want to read the latest post then you should drop by now.
There are many lists of sites that accept pings, but getting your blog to ping all of these can be a bit of a pain (and slow down the posting process). This is where the ping relay services come in. These ping services relay a single ping from your blog on to several other services on your behalf. This makes it easy for you to notify loads of services that your site has been updated, all from one ping!
There are usually two methods to use these ping relay services: (a) by visiting the site, manually filling out the form and submitting it, or (b), by using XML-RPC, and getting your blog to notify these services directly.
For the first part of this survey I’ll be testing the latter - using XML-RPC. I’ll be using a really good monitoring service to measure both the performance (how quick they are) and availability (how much of the time they are up and running) of these services, and will report back here in due course.
The test will involve pinging these services every ten minutes, and measuring things like DNS lookup time, connect time (establishing a connection with the server), initial response time (time before the first byte of data comes back in the response), and time to download the complete response.
The services I’ll be measuring for this first survey are:
Sadly, the XML-RPC interface to Pingoat is down at the moment.
The second part of the survey will look at some of the web form based services. The three services listed above all offer this feature, as do the following sites:
In the meantime, if anyone knows any other XML-RPC ping relay services, please do let me know and I’ll add them to the survey.
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