Average ping for pools in EU is 50-60. Germany/France/Italy less than 10. USA/Australia/China 200+
When you say "Ping" I suppose you mean ICMP packets, aka you go into CMD and type ping pool.com ? that is actually somehow inaccurate as far as mining is concerned, what you need is "Stratum Ping", whereby you connect to the pool via Stratum protocol, initiates a login via the Stratum protocol and then receive the response from the pool, the round trip duration will be your accurate ping results.
Alas, that's not correct.
Stratum is a permanent tcp connection, so there is no connection initialisation required each time work is sent to the miner and each time a miner sends a share to the pool, only once at the start.
The stratum connection protocol is a bit messed up also, since it was designed on top of LP, but has multiple extra packets sent and received during initialisation.
The idea of a ping is to show the time for a packet to be sent to a destination and the reply to get back from the destination,
which is exactly what a share does and exactly what a work items does.
Those mining packet sizes are also quite small (ref:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789369.msg41861265#msg41861265 )
A ping, by default, ends up being 64 bytes, sent and received, thus when compared to a share, the larger size of under 200 bytes sent (and 51 bytes received) means that it's the same in terms of how networks work.
Even though a share also means a second round trip reply stating if it was accepted or rejected, that 2nd round trip has no effect on the time to get the share to the pool.
So yes, indeed, a ping 'can' give you a good idea of your connection performance to the pool's node you are mining to.
However, it can also give you a worse result depending upon the network you are connecting through, since ping packets are usually given lower priority.
Also, of course, the packet gets to the pool before the reply gets back to you, so you could suggest that the time to get a share to the pool is half the ping time.
