How can I find the response time (latency) of a client in NodeJS with sockets (socket.io)?

Question

I\'m trying to create a multiplayer game with NodeJS and I want to synchronize the action between clients.

What would be the best way to find the latency (the time that

Answer 1

Heres my really quick and dirty script to test the ping ... just head to http://yourserver:8080 in your browser and watch the console (ssh terminal for me).

var http = require('http');
var io = require('socket.io');

server = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html'});
  res.write('\n');
  res.write('  \n');
  res.write('    \n');
  res.write('    \n');
  res.write('    \n');
  res.write('  \n');
  res.write('  \n');
  res.write('    
Node Ping
\n');
  res.write('  \n');
  res.write('\n');
  res.end();
});
server.listen(8080);

console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8080/');

var socket = io.listen(server);

socket.on('connection',function(client){
  var start = new Date().getTime();
  client.send(1);
  client.on('message',function(message){ client.send(1);  console.log( new Date$
  client.on('disconnect',function(){});
});

I'm very curious about this because it seems like my pings are pretty high(200-400ms round trip) on large vps boxes w/ dedicated resources both in california and new jersey. (I'm on the east coast) I'm betting theres just a lot of latency on the vps boxes b/c they're serving so much traffic?

The thing that gets me is that a regular ping from the linux terminal from the same client to the same server is 11ms on average a factor of 10 lower ... am I doing something wrong or is something slow with node.js/socket.io/websockets?