Re: request an enhancement about ping : adding the median

[address@hidden]

Alfred M. Szmidt:
>    I use ping quite frequently and I found out that the values given where
>    only min/avg/max/stddev and there is not the median. Is there a reason
>    for that ? I think the median could be a quite useful data, to monitor
>    the network.
> 
> Interesting, I've never used median -- only the mean.  Could you
> explain in more detail the exact use case?  I think a way to get the
> median seems sensible though, but would really be interested in
> hearing why you are interested in it, and how the mean isn't what you
> want.
> 

I need to use the median because with the mean one needs to erase the
extrema before calculating it, and even with that it's possible to have
a result which do not at all represent the distribution because of a
single value very different from the others.
For example if you have all latencies ranged between 10ms and 20ms
except one latency which is about 300ms the mean could be about 50ms,
100ms or even 200ms but the median will still be between 10ms and 20ms…
So if you need to determine how good the connexion is with only one
value the median is much better (and it's even more the case if you
check the quality of the connexion for using it in UDP after that).
--
Raichu