Ping says 3 ms but orders take 150 ms

[Amanhasnoname]

A ping to the broker's IP measures one thing: how long a tiny packet takes to bounce off a network device. It says nothing about what happens once the order arrives. A real order passes a gateway, risk checks, liquidity routing, maybe a last-look window, and then the confirmation travels back. Depending on the setup that can be anywhere from 20 ms to several hundred, and the network leg is often the smallest slice.

The easy way to see the real number is to log it. Have the EA or script grab a millisecond timestamp right before the order is sent and again when the result returns (GetTickCount in MT4, GetMicrosecondCount in MT5). Do it for a few hundred market orders, not five, because the spread of results matters more than the average. Look at the median and the 95th percentile. A median of 60 ms with a 95th percentile of 400 ms is a very different story from a flat 100 ms.

Keep demo and live separate. Demo servers often answer faster and with cleaner fills, so demo numbers flatter the setup. Use minimum size on a live account for the test.

Judge a VPS or a broker by order round-trip percentiles, not by ping.

What round-trip numbers are showing up on live accounts, and how wide is the gap between the median and the worst 5 percent?