Ping server survey, November 2006
Here are the November Ping Relay Server Survey results. For details of the methodology take a look at the first post on this topic. I am currently monitoring the following three ping services: Autopinger, Blogflux, and Ping-o-matic.
Service Uptime Results
| Uptime | Problem* | Down** | Error Time | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Autopinger | 10.85% | 89.08% | 0.07% | 26d 17h 52m |
| Blogflux | 43.94% | 56.06% | 0.00% | 20d 6h 35m |
| Pingomatic | 99.54% | 0.46% | 0.00% | 3h 19m |
*For example, couldn’t connect to web server, web server failed to respond in time, web server returned an invalid response etc.
**For example a server 500 error or a DNS outage.
Some disappointing results this month for both Autopinger and Blogflux. Autopinger have been down since Saturday 10th December. Sadly, they’ve been having some web hosting issues. They have told me that they are in the process of moving to a new hosting provider, but they still seem to be having problems today — well into December.
Blogflux on the other hand inform me that they have been experiencing a denial of service attack, which is why performance has been so bad. It strikes me that if you run a ping relay service this is pretty much what you have to expect - and lets not forget all those spammers that bombard you with endless pings too.
Remember that we give up sending our ping after 10 seconds, so if their webserver doesn’t respond in that time the test will be flagged as a bad one. If you persist with Blogflux you may find you get a response eventually.
As usual, Ping-o-matic did very well, with only a few connection timeout issues. Well done Ping-o-matic!
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December 20th, 2006 18:20
About to send out an email to all our members - we are doing a major re-write, including one of Pinger. It should perform (much) better around middle of January
You should add Pingoat to that list - it is more popular than our service or AP.
December 20th, 2006 20:44
Hey Ahmed, good luck with the rewrite — hope it goes well!
From what I can tell, the Pingoat XML-RPC surver is down at the moment. Do you know differently?
December 20th, 2006 21:20
Ah just XML-RPC. Sorry, didn’t know its status.
December 21st, 2006 03:42
We are actually going to change it so that the only way to ping through us is to have your blog approved on our site.
There is so much spam coming that it is almost like a mini-DDoS.
December 21st, 2006 10:57
That’s a good idea Ahmed, and is what we’ve done with BritBlog. We hold a list of all valid URLs in memory which makes validating incoming pings very quick and efficient. I’m amazed by how quickly our RPC URI got out to the spammers…