Let me explain why.įirst of all, ICMP is a different type of protocol that is being handled by the Internet routing machinery differently.

Now let’s get to the mistake many people are making: when they talk about “ping to the pool”, they actually think about the standard ping utility (named the same in Windows and Linux), which uses special ICMP packets to measure the particular host response time, but… this is not exactly relevant for a mining pool. If the connection to the pool is not optimal, then the solution your rig may have found may arrive later than it could, resulting in an orphan block or no block at all - which means fewer profits no matter whether you’re on a shared or solo pool. For blockchains with short block time (such as Ethereum), this is particularly vital. Why? The better the connection to your pool is, the faster your mining rig can receive new data and the more iterations on finding the solution it can take. So what does ping mean for the miner?įirst and foremost: ping is very important. Ping is named after the so-called Ping network utility. Ping is usually measured in milliseconds, the lower the ping, the less time it takes for the data to travel between two destinations. What is ping, anyway? Simply speaking, ping, or latency, is the total time it takes for some data to reach a distant service and for us to receive a response. What should be considered as a good result?.

Ping eu port chk