How to implement PsPing TCP ping in C#

Question

I am trying to implement Mark Russinovich\'s SysInternals PsPing tool in C# to measure latencies using TCP ping.

I am not sure how it makes the ping call (apparently

Answer 1

I have compared the above tcpping.exe with PsPing.exe. The output result of PsPing.exe is very close to ping.exe of windows, and the output of tcpping.exe varies widely.

Answer 2

I have tried several approaches, first thinking I had to use raw sockets or at least use native calls, but a simple TCP connect and close seems to create exactly the same results as the psping utility:

var times = new List<double>();
for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
{
    var sock = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
    sock.Blocking = true;

    var stopwatch = new Stopwatch();

    // Measure the Connect call only
    stopwatch.Start();
    sock.Connect(endPoint);
    stopwatch.Stop();

    double t = stopwatch.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds;
    Console.WriteLine("{0:0.00}ms", t);
    times.Add(t);

    sock.Close();

    Thread.Sleep(1000);
}
Console.WriteLine("{0:0.00} {1:0.00} {2:0.00}", times.Min(), times.Max(), times.Average());

Inspecting the traffic using Wireshark, I can confirm both psping and the snippet above are creating exactly the same sequence of packets.

-> [SYN]
<- [SYN,ACK]
-> [ACK]
-> [FIN,ACK]
<- [FIN,ACK]
-> [ACK]

Output from psping with no warm-up and using TCP ping:

C:\>psping -w 0 stackoverflow.com:80

PsPing v2.01 - PsPing - ping, latency, bandwidth measurement utility
Copyright (C) 2012-2014 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

TCP connect to 198.252.206.16:80:
4 iterations (warmup 0) connecting test:
Connecting to 198.252.206.16:80: 92.30ms
Connecting to 198.252.206.16:80: 83.16ms
Connecting to 198.252.206.16:80: 83.29ms
Connecting to 198.252.206.16:80: 82.98ms

TCP connect statistics for 198.252.206.16:80:
  Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
  Minimum = 82.98ms, Maximum = 92.30ms, Average = 85.43ms

Output from the program above:

C:\>TcpPing.exe stackoverflow.com 80
88.60ms
83.65ms
84.05ms
84.05ms
83.65 88.60 85.09

As for measurements, I must say, sometimes there are quite a few different results at different runs, but overall they seemed pretty close: kind of proves measuring the Connect() call is good enough. I'm thinking, taking a median of a few hundred results might prove it with a bit more confidence.

Answer 3

Winsock will certainly allow you to do this easily.

Did you look at source of programs like http://www.elifulkerson.com/projects/tcping.php ?

Pretty straightforward program (console) which does exactly what you want (AFAIK), and provided with source code which looks like to be very clear, short and easy to read (even for non c++ programmers, I didn't practice C++ since a while and despite it I found it very nice to read).

You can build it and debug it with VS to quickly find what you want. It should be easy to get there the few Win32 API calls involved in TCP Ping. This way, you can certainly easily convert the interesting part to C# or embed it in a managed DLL.

Just test before if it does exactly what you want.

Source link : http://www.elifulkerson.com/projects/downloads/tcping-0.23/tcping-src.zip