How can I get ping timeout below 1 second?

Question

I have a web application that runs through thousands of IP addresses and checks if they're online. Basically, if a server uses more than 250ms to respond, it's considered offline in our case. It would be an enormous timesaver if we could get the ping command to give up after about 300 ms, instead of what seems to be the minimum value of the -W parameter, 1 second.

Answer 1

Found a similar question out there, and the answer was a ping alternative called fping. Maybe it'll be of some use to you. http://serverfault.com/questions/200468/how-can-i-set-a-short-timeout-with-the-ping-command

Answer 2

From the man pages on ping it looks as though it is the -o to send only 1 packet...

ping -W 250 -o

That should return much more quickly also the -W parameter is in milliseconds, so that should send 1 packet and only wait 250ms for a response.

EDIT You Sure?:

$ ping -W 250 -o google.com
PING google.com (74.125.224.178): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 74.125.224.178: icmp_seq=0 ttl=51 time=18.850 ms
--- google.com ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 18.850/18.850/18.850/0.000 ms