Packet loss test
Find out whether repeated requests to a website drop or time out — with a plain-English verdict, not just numbers.
How this test works: a traditional packet loss test sends ICMP packets ("pings"). PingStuff instead sends 8 real web requests — the thing that actually matters for whether visitors can load your site — and reports how many complete.
Reading the results
A request counts as delivered when the server answers with any HTTP response within 8 seconds — even an error page proves the network carried the request and the reply. A request counts as dropped when the connection fails outright, and requests that take longer than 8 seconds to complete count as dropped too. The requests run one after another from a single PingStuff location, so this samples the path over time rather than hitting the site with a burst.
Want to know when requests start failing, not just whether they failed right now? Turn on monitoring and PingStuff checks your site on a schedule and alerts you when it stops answering.
Questions
- How is this different from an ICMP packet loss test?
- Classic packet loss tools send ICMP echo packets ("pings") and count how many come back. PingStuff doesn't send ICMP — and ICMP wouldn't tell you whether the website actually works, only whether the machine answers pings. Instead we send 8 real HTTP requests, the same kind a visitor's browser makes, and report how many complete. If these drop, your visitors feel it.
- What causes dropped web requests?
- An overloaded or crashing server, network congestion or a flaky route between networks, a struggling load balancer or reverse proxy, DNS trouble mid-request, or a firewall or rate limiter cutting connections. A one-off drop is often transient congestion; drops that repeat run after run usually point at the server or its network.
- Is 1 of 8 requests failing bad?
- One dropped request is 12.5% of this small sample — worth a second look, not an alarm. Run the test again: a single drop that never repeats was probably transient. A drop that shows up every run means roughly one in eight visitors is hitting a slow or failed page load, and that's worth fixing.
- How do I monitor this over time?
- An 8-request sample is a snapshot. PingStuff monitoring checks your site on a schedule around the clock, records failures and response times, and alerts you when requests start failing — so you catch trouble before your visitors report it.
Related tools
- Latency Test — Response time, phase by phase — multi-region rolling out.
- Response Time Test — How fast your site responds, broken down phase by phase.