suggestion for enhancement: show median of measurements

[folkertvanheusden]

Hi,

It would be awesome of arping would also show the median after measuring, to get rid of outliers.

Also, a flood-ping would be helpful (-W 0 so to say, without the break).

regards

[ThomasHabets]

Hmm… not sure why the code effectively rejects -W 0. That traces back to 2016, which seems like a lifetime ago. Fixing that.

For the median: Yes, that would be great. But how would one go about doing that, without using an unbounded amount of RAM?

[folkertvanheusden]

Regarding the median: you could maybe only allow it when one sets a maximum number of pings. Or maybe remember only the last x of them.
On the other hand: if you store the measurements as float, it will be 4 bytes per item. 10 thousand pings would take around 40 kilobyte.

[ThomasHabets]

The problem with that is that whatever special limit is put on it, it's going to be slightly wrong for someone. It does make sense to have a default of "last up to 100" or whatever magic value is the default, and then allow the user to change that. But that means another flag. And it's pretty obscure, to dedicate a letter to. So maybe long options? Arping currently doesn't use long options. How will that affect portability?

So for long term maintenance and compatibility, that's what I'm thinking.

I think it requires a bit of thinking to get right. The above is off the top of my head, so there could be other factors.

I don't want to add it only to need breaking changes later.