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very neat - i think it should use "green" to indicate faster response times instead of red... also the URL length available to ping is very small...
Really like the concept - lovely visualisation. My comments:

- The URL length limit is way too low! If I want to test a specific asset that's delivered by CDN there is no way to do that

- The colours seem inverted (I'd expect green for fast, red for slow) but this may be a cultural thing

- I'd dampen down the grey a bit, it looks like it's a measurement but really I think that's just places where no test was performed?

- Presumably you know where you can get measurements from so perhaps the initial map should be dual toned to reflect that

It's pretty neat but the URL length is a huge problem, you can check any moderately long domains at all.
Thanks for pointing that out. It's been resolved.
This seems to utterly kill/freeze Safari on my iPad.
Very nice but you need more test machines in each location on different networks and then average them.

My server is in London but got a ping of 276ms in London and only 39ms in Paris. There must be a bottleneck somewhere.

Seems interesting, but after hitting enter in Chrome 28.0.1469.0 dev, nothing happens. Watching my server logs shows no activity. And agree with @whiskers, the URL length limit is way too low.
Same problem for me in FireFox 20
We may have already overloaded the system. Though, I noticed a large number of accesses coming via "wheresitup.com/1.1" in my server logs. Using that site directly even is very slow.
Doesn't seem to be working at all.

I type news.ycombinator.com at the URL prompt, hit Enter. Nothing happens, then in 2 to 10 seconds the URL changes to "Loading.." with a new dot appended every second. And after few more seconds it changes back to the URL input and blinking cursor. The map on top stays exactly the same - white pixel grid of the world on black.

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(edit) Upvote this -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5538604

the same for me
Second that. Doesn't work for me
Hi,

I'm running the data provider for that: http://api.wheresitup.com/

My bad.

Our system uses gearman and supervisord to manage the job queue, but didn't have systems in place to notice an exploding work queue. The job queue hit 13k at one point, which is clearly sub-optimal. We've launched 4x our normal worker count and performance on that system (and for our other customers) has recovered.

sorry for the delay paul

Thanks Paul. You're legend for resolving that so quickly.
I like the idea greatly, but it appears to be broken at the moment. Perhaps the HN load is too high?
What library/code are you using to draw tho maps with the pixels? Is it all your own?
The map is an SVG document. clipPaths (basically masks) have been created for each landmass. The pings being displayed are just circles with gradients, but you only see them through the 'pixelated' landmass mask.

The map starts a static SVG file and the pings are added to the DOM with JS. The animation is a mix of JS and SMIL.

Killed/froze my iPhone 5 on Chrome.
Apologies, a few teething troubles with the load. Working to resolve it.
The url length means I can't test most URLs
Works for me now, and I like the concept a lot.

Apparently the response time from Hangzhou to google.com is 792737264ms (about 9 days)...so there might be a bug there.

Very cool! Although just like lot of people here pointed out, I feel like the colors are inverted.
127.0.0.1 responds pretty quick