Anyone know of a free flood ping utility for Windows?

Question

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.

Solution 1

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

Solution 2

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.

Comments

[Admin]

I think do are looking for -A Adaptive ping. Interpacket interval adapts to round-trip time, so that effectively not more than one (or more, if preload is set) unanswered probes present in the network. Minimal interval is 200msec for not super-user. On networks with low rtt this mode is essentially equivalent to flood mode. This option is available for ping in GNU Linux, maybe you need ask the same option for Windows

[Admin]

@JoseNobile That is quite different from ping -f, which specifically does not limit the number of unanswered probes, but instead shows the number of lost pings by printing dots.

[Zoredache]

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.

[raja]

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)

[Florent Courtay]

There's also a frontend for iperf, xjperf (code.google.com/p/xjperf ) that i find really easy to use

[Admin]

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.)

[Admin]

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.

[Zoredache]

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.

[knob]

Ping floods are definitely useful to determine what kind of traffic latency / jitter / loss characteristics you're seeing on a network in real time, especially if the network uses wifi; ping floods are often a useful and legitimate tool.

[AndreKR]

-1 It seems (correct me if I'm wrong) that iperf requires a server on the other end and also doesn't provide the real time feedback that ping -f does.

[AndreKR]

That is way to slow and doesn't provide the real time feedback that ping -f does.

[Zoredache]

@AndreKR You are correct that iperf requires a server. I don't think Windows had a flood ping at the time, and I didn't think a flood ping was that useful for testing packet loss and jitter which is what the OP had asked for. I was trying to help answer the underling problem instead of answering the literal answer from the subject. Anyway the question has since been marked as closed since recommendations are off-topic.