I'm implementing a browser extension which should connect to the nearest server to test the ping speed.

To have more details, kindly have a look on SpeedTest, it first calculates the ping time.
And to calculate this ping time, it detects the nearest servers and then pings it.

For example, here's the nearest servers detected by SpeedTest. I marked them in red arrows

How does SpeedTest detect these servers ?

i.e. How can I detect the nearest servers and their locations in javascript as SpeedTest does ?

I'm implementing a browser extension which should connect to the nearest server to test the ping speed.

To have more details, kindly have a look on SpeedTest, it first calculates the ping time.
And to calculate this ping time, it detects the nearest servers and then pings it.

For example, here's the nearest servers detected by SpeedTest. I marked them in red arrows

How does SpeedTest detect these servers ?

i.e. How can I detect the nearest servers and their locations in javascript as SpeedTest does ?

• javascript
• ping
• latency
• geoip
• speed-test

• I found some geoip libraries that have some useful functionalities, like detecting your geographical place based on your ip, for example maxmind./en/web_services, but i didn't find any function in documentation which get list of servers (ip/long/lat), BTW, i'm not sure whether i took the right path in investigation :) – Ashraf Bashir Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 15:31
• 1 That information is quite possibly preputed, and certainly is probably not puted live on the client. If that is puted at run-time it almost definitely would be done on the server, not in client-side js – Ben McCormick Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 15:35
• You are totally right. That's why I'm looking for a webservice to do so, so that i may connect to it in JS. But I didn't manage to find one – Ashraf Bashir Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 15:39

1 Answer 1

What speedtest is doing is not a real "ping" in the sense of having the client machine run a ping operation. I have no knowledge of their exact methods (and I believe they use flash rather than pure JS, or at least used to), but I would guess that they try to access a small resource (an empty text/image file?) on each of these machines, and then time the response back. That is certainly one way to implement this anyway.