Does pinging a website increase number of hits?

Question

I recently found the ping command on the mac. I used to it casually ping my rails heroku app. I was wondering if this type of ping, from the terminal, increases the total number of hits the website gets (obviously not unique hits).

Answer 1

What Anthony said above is true. Ping uses ICMP which is lower in the stack than an http request going over port 80. Ping only sends a single packet, expecting a single packet in response which is rather small (I think 64bytes round trip).

This can however generate load on the box running your server. So be wary of excess use as you could inadvertently cause a denial of service :)

Answer 2

ping is a network command not using the port 80 or http protocol. So there's no way it can count towards a rails application hit.

More info : http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Which_port_is_used_by_Ping_command

Answer 3

The ping command only pings the host, it is a network tool to check connectivity between machines, it is a different protocol from HTTP, please read this, it may help you understand a bit better what is ping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_%28networking_utility%29 and what is his uses.

Cheers