So...First after closing all programs that require the net I made sure nothing apart from MetaTrader was running, went to the command prompt from the Start > Run menu and then typed in "netstat -n" without the quotes, and it showed Mt4's connection, its listed as "Established and shows an IP address connected to port 443 which is the Port Mt4 will use to send/receive data.
SLM's IP address for the server its connecting to through the MT4 terminal is 89.16.250.40 from what I gather as thats the only active connection showing up on port 443...
If anybody wants to double check and make sure this is their mt4 servers IP just netstat -n from your command prompt when your Platform is open and it should show you that IP.
Now...From Sunday's opening and throughout the Day today, in the command prompt typing in ping 89.16.250.40 is showing me, with 4 ping's...their server is replying back to me with an average of 23 to 63ish milliseconds...The slowest single ping reply was this afternoon which took 213ms to reply back from the server.
The IP belongs to a hosting company by the name of Sohonet.co.uk with the server in Westminster, London if the info is correct.
Now...Running various Tracer Route tools is showing me that talking to the server and getting back to me it's going through an average of 13 to 16 different nodes or whats called 'Hops'. That sounds like a fair amount to me? The Traceroute with different tools are all showing that the data is being sent from the UK all the way just before Chicago in the US, and then coming back to Sohonets network. Should it be taking this many hops just to sent Data from Leicester to London with ping times of 50ish ms? Maybe SLM need to look into this more.
Heres my result from PingTest.net to show my connection is fine, its able to send pings to a server around 100miles away from me to Maidenhead, from Leicester where I am, quite quickly...
So, my connection seems fast enough, no problems reported by my ISP either, router/firewall etc all optimum...Generally the pings are taking 50-60ish milliseconds to talk to SLM's IP. Im interested to know if they can do something to cut this down to under 20ms as its not uncommon to find brokers within the US for instance who have Latency times as low as 5-10ms which gives their clients real fast execution and minimal slippage/requotes etc.
Would others be kind enough to share their Ping/Latency results by getting onto pingtest.net and sharing their end result through the generated link, and also by going onto yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/ and traceroute SLM's IP to see how many hops on average it appears to take to reach their IP address? Please try post your City, what ISP you're with with what mb connection.
My average ping times: 23ms at the quickest to contact SLM's IP, but mostly around 50-60ms
City: Leicester
ISP: Virgin Media with 20mb broadband.
Traceroute Hops: between 13-16 hops.
Sorry for the long post, if we can just get a few people to post up their results maybe we can get an idea.