How to determine latency of a remote server through the browser

Question

I run a couple of game tunnelling servers and would like to have a page where the client can run a ping on all the servers and find out which is the most responsive. As far

Answer 1

It's not that hard to measure server response time in Flash.

Flash must ask for a policy file before accessing remote servers. The default location for such policy file is at the root folder of the server: /crossdomain.xml

(You can easily find information about the crossdomain file format)

Since such file is needed anyway, why not use it to measure server response time? Load the file itself instead of an image and measure the time it took using getTimer() .

This will give you a good estimate on HTTP connections.

But if you're dealing with game servers, you might want to directly check the speed of the TCP connection. To do that you'll need to use the flash.net.Socket You'll also have to ask for a policy file first by running: Security.loadPolicyFile("xmlsocket://server.domain.com:5342");

Where 5342 represents your server's port number where it should respond with the proper XML policy string. After making the socket connection, any request/response will let you measure different server response times.