Why do sites have different ping and ttl values?

How busy the server is and the distance will both affect ping time. Some sites/networks/devices will drop ping altogether. Your packets can only travel as fast as wire speed, the farther the distance the longer it takes, the higher the ping. pinging localhost 127.0.0.1 can be considered your baseline for pings, anything further than that will be incrementally higher. TTL is 'time to live' for ICMP packets the basically record the # of hops then time out so they don't just bounce around forever.

For instance

# ping localhost

PING blah (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from blah (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.042 ms

# ping google.com

PING google.com (74.125.225.50) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 74.125.225.50: icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=2.28 ms

So the round trip took 2.28ms, knowing TTL starts at 64 for a ping packet from that machine I know how many devices in some way shape or form forwarded that packet to its destination by the return TTL (traceroute packets work the opposite way and start at 1). A lower TTL does not mean lower traffic. This can be verified by a traceroute/MTR (ip's removed to protect the innocent)

# mtr google.com

Host Loss% Last Avg Best Wrst StDev

1. hop1 0.0% 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.2 0.0

2. hop2 0.0% 1.8 0.7 0.3 3.3 0.7

3. hop3 0.0% 0.4 0.6 0.3 6.2 1.3

4. hop4 0.0% 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.4 0.0

5. hop5 0.0% 1.8 6.9 1.7 68.9 15.9

6. hop6 0.0% 2.1 5.4 2.0 36.6 10.1

7. hop7 0.0% 2.2 6.4 2.1 75.7 16.0

8. hop8 0.0% 2.9 3.0 2.3 8.0 1.3

9. 74.125.225.50 0.0% 2.1 2.3 2.1 2.6 0.2

Do the math and the TTL will match the # of hops.

I'm simplifying for brevity, there are other factors at work but that's the short of it. thinks like load balancing will also affect pingtime/traceroutes, what OS you use will also change your results (those results are from a linux machine).

Ttl Values

The ping values depend on the network traffic from your place to the destination and back. Do you know also that ping values on the same site varies? Try doing a non-stop ping like this:

ping -t <your_site>

For example when I ping www.yahoo.com I get a wide range of ping values. It tells me that the traffic to that site is not constant.

Only very occasionally. Pings are what I hear when my 007 duties take me on board the Valiant class nuclear submarine ... there is a sonar operator who tends to pong a lot evey time he gets a ping (I think probably through too much curry)