2 Hz
one update every 500.0 ms
What this test sends:
2 packets per second of 30 bytes, matching Old School RuneScape rather than a generic ping.
verified
The OSRS game tick is exactly 600 ms (1.67 Hz), documented by Jagex and central to the game's mechanics. This test sends 2 Hz because the catalogue holds whole numbers - see the note on the page.
A note on what this test sends: the OSRS tick is 600 ms, which is 1.67 per second. Our catalogue holds whole numbers, so this test sends 2 packets per second. That is close, deliberately stated rather than hidden, and it does not change what the measurement tells you - loss and jitter on your line are properties of the line, not of the rate we probe it at.
Run the test above for at least 60 seconds. Here is what each
number means for this game specifically.
Ping (in ticks, not milliseconds)
The only question that matters is whether your round trip fits inside 600 ms, and for almost everyone it does. At 50 ms you have 550 ms of headroom; at 250 ms you still have 350. This is why Australian players compete on equal footing in a way that would be impossible in any shooter. Ping only starts costing you ticks when it approaches 600 ms.
Packet loss (this is the one that hurts)
A lost packet does not degrade smoothly here. Your input for that tick is simply not there, and the server moves on without it. In a tick-perfect switch, in a freeze escape, or at a Zulrah phase change, that is the whole difference. Any visible red on this chart is worth fixing before you blame your reaction time.
Jitter (the invisible tick-eater)
Jitter is what turns a comfortable 200 ms into an occasional 700 ms. The average looks fine and the outliers are what cost you. If your ping line is spiky rather than high, that is the shape of the problem - and it is far more common on a wireless link than a genuinely slow route is.
What you see in game, and which number on this page explains it.
Almost every modern multiplayer game is built to hide latency. Client-side prediction, interpolation, lag compensation and rollback all exist to paper over the gap between what you see and what the server knows. Old School RuneScape does none of it. The server processes a tick every 600 milliseconds, your input either made that tick or it did not, and what you see is what happened.
The consequence is unusual and mostly good. Because the tick is so long relative to any realistic ping, players separated by thousands of kilometres genuinely act on the same tick. There is no peeker's advantage, no favour-the-shooter, no invisible penalty for living far from a data centre. The skill ceiling in OSRS is about knowing tick timings, not about owning a better route to the server.
But the same design removes every safety net for a bad connection. In a shooter, one lost packet is smoothed over by interpolation and you may never notice. Here, a lost packet means your click for that tick does not exist. There is no partial credit and no catching up: the tick passed. That is why players who describe their connection as 'fine' still lose freezes and switches - fine on average is not the same as fine at the moment the tick closed.
This is also why a bandwidth test tells you nothing useful about OSRS. The game moves a trickle of data. What decides whether you keep your tick is whether that trickle arrives on time, every time - which is precisely what loss and jitter measure and what a download speed does not.
If the chart above shows packet loss or high jitter, work through
these in order.
What is a good ping for Old School RuneScape?
Anything under about 300 ms is fine for nearly all content, because the 600 ms tick absorbs it. Under 150 ms you will not notice latency at all. It is one of the very few games where a 200 ms connection is genuinely competitive.
Why do I still lose tick-perfect switches on low ping?
Because the enemy of a tick is not average latency but a single late or lost packet. Run this test for a few minutes and look for red lines and spikes rather than at the average number.
Does a lower ping give me an advantage in PvP?
Only at the margin. Both players' actions resolve on the same tick boundary, so a 40 ms player and a 200 ms player are usually acting on the same tick. Consistency beats raw ping here in a way it does not in other PvP games.
Is 2 Hz really how the game works?
The game tick is 600 ms, which is 1.67 per second. This test sends 2 packets per second because the catalogue stores whole numbers. The small difference does not affect what loss and jitter on your line look like.