PingLatencyOverlay

Live network latency as a small graph that sits on top of your screen. Always visible, click-through, and out of the way — and cheap enough to leave running all day.

Why you might want it

• Always-on-top graphs that never steal your clicks. The overlay is click-through, so you can keep playing or working underneath it.
• Small enough to leave running. With no settings window open, the tray and the overlay use about 35 MB of memory between them. Close the tray and leave the overlay running and it drops to about 17 MB. Figures vary by machine.
• Genuinely transparent. Set the background to fully invisible and you are left with just the line, or a soft tinted panel if you prefer.
• Ping or TCP. Measure ICMP latency, or the time it takes to complete a TCP handshake with a host and port — useful when ICMP is filtered or lying.
• Any monitor, any corner. Pick the spot with a small on-screen position picker, then nudge it with independent horizontal and vertical margins.
• Tuned to your taste. Line color, timeout color, background color and opacity, graph size, how much history to show, and which latency counts as the top of the graph.
• Start-up flourish if you want it. Fade the line in, or run a border effect when an overlay comes up.
• No telemetry, no account, no cloud. Everything stays on your machine.
• No Administrator rights. It runs as you do.

Install

Grab the installer for your machine from the Releases page — pick x64 for most PCs, ARM64 for Windows on Arm. One installer, nothing else to install.

The app starts in the system tray, so it will not get in your way while you set it up.

Getting started

1. Open the Config window. Left-click the tray icon to open it. Right-click for a menu with Config, Pause / Resume, Close tray, keep overlays running and Exit.
2. Add an overlay. Press Add overlay in the list pane. Give it a name you will recognise later.
3. Choose a protocol and a target.
   • ICMP — enter a hostname or IP address. This is the same measurement ping makes, and it does not need Administrator.
   • TCP — enter a hostname or IP and a port. This measures the time to complete a connection handshake, which is a better signal than ICMP on networks that deprioritise or block it.
4. Set the timeout. Anything slower than this is drawn in the timeout color rather than as a latency value, so a stalled probe looks different from a slow one.
5. Press Save. Your overlay appears on screen within a second.

Everything is sampled once a second.

The settings that matter

Setting	What it does
Name	Shown in the list. Purely for your benefit.
Protocol	ICMP (ping) or TCP (connect).
Target host / IP	Hostname or address to probe.
Port (TCP only)	Port to connect to.
Timeout	Above this, the sample is drawn as a timeout instead of a latency.
Sampling	How much history the graph holds.
X axis scale	How many seconds each pixel of width covers. Lower means finer detail over a shorter span.
Y axis height	Height of the overlay in pixels.
Latency ceiling	The latency that reaches the top of the graph. Values above it clamp.
Orientation	Rotates the graph anticlockwise, so 90° makes time run bottom-to-top.
Mirrored	Flips the graph.
Smooth rendering	Interpolates between samples instead of stepping.
Smooth FPS	How often the smoothed graph redraws.
Line color	The latency trace.
Timeout color	The trace for samples that timed out.
Timeout indicator	How a timeout is marked: a full-height Stick (the default), a two-pixel Stub at the bottom edge, or a Gap that draws nothing.
Background color / Background opacity	The panel behind the graph. Fully transparent gives you a bare line on a bare screen.
Position	A small picker showing the screen. Click where you want the overlay. See below.
Horizontal / Vertical margin	Nudges the overlay away from its anchor.
Enabled	Turns probing on or off for this overlay without deleting it.

There are also start-up options — Cosmetic startup prefill, its animation length, and a Startup border effect with its own timing — if you want the overlay to announce itself when it appears.

Positioning an overlay

The Position control shows a small map of the screen. Click the spot you want, and the overlay anchors to whichever of the nine positions is nearest, so it sits against that edge of the work area and stays clear of the taskbar.

Horizontal margin and Vertical margin then nudge it away from that anchor. Both start at 0. On an edge anchor, positive values move inward and negative values move outward; on a centred axis, positive moves right or down. Negative values can push an overlay off the work area entirely, which is sometimes what you want for a second monitor.

Profiles

A profile is a complete, named set of overlays. Use them to keep separate setups for separate situations — home and work, or a game versus a video call — and switch between them without rebuilding anything each time.

• Switch from the menu at the top of the list pane, or from the Profiles page.
• Create, rename, duplicate and delete on the Profiles page.
• Display names do not have to be unique. Two profiles can both be called Work; they simply get separate files behind the scenes.
• The profile you were last using is remembered and reloaded at the next launch.
• You cannot switch profiles while you have unsaved edits. Press Save or Discard first — the app will tell you when it is blocking you.

Save and Discard live in a fixed bar under the right-hand pane, so they sit next to the settings they write.

Closing the window closes the window — the tray and your overlays carry on running. If you have unsaved changes it asks first, offering Save, Discard or Cancel. To stop everything, use the tray's Exit.

Close tray, keep overlays running is the one to reach for if you want the lowest footprint: the tray goes, the overlay stays, and the app is down to about 17 MB. Bring the tray back whenever you like by running it again from the Start menu.

Where your settings live

%USERPROFILE%\.config\.PingLatencyOverlay\
├── globalconfig.json
└── profiles\
    ├── profile_default.json
    └── profile_work.json

Plain JSON, one file per profile. If you are upgrading from a version that used a single config.json, it is migrated for you on first launch.

For contributors

Building and running from source

Requires the MSVC toolchain and Build Tools. From src-tauri/:

cargo run                  # development build; opens the Config window
cargo build --release      # optimised standalone executables
cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings

Three executables are written to src-tauri\target\release\: the tray, the Config window, and the renderer. cargo run starts the window, which brings up the other two if they are not already running.

To build an installer, commit first — the version number comes from the Git commit count — then from the repository root:

npm run icons
npm run bundle

ARM64 needs the ARM64 build tools and Rust target:

cargo build --release --target aarch64-pc-windows-msvc
.\scripts\build-nsis.ps1 -Arch arm64

Further detail lives in AGENTS.md for contributors and docs/SPEC.md for the full behaviour specification.

Support the project

PingLatencyOverlay is free, with no telemetry, accounts or ads. If it has earned a spot on your screen, you can buy me a coffee through PayPal — entirely optional.

License

PingLatencyOverlay is free software released under the GNU General Public License, version 3 only (GPL-3.0-only). Copyright © Evert Chin (megablue).

The complete license text is available in LICENSE. Source code for released versions is available from the corresponding GitHub release/tag.