I pinged every IP address that wasn't reserved. The image is 8k by 8k and is re-encoded as an AVIF to be friendlier to mobile devices. Like every other survey done, it is using a Hilbert Curve to convert the linear address space to a contiguous 2d space. The hotter the colors (blue is coolest), the denser the ping responses were.
(If you are interested I can provide the full-resolution pyramidal-tiled TIFF (about 1 GB) that requires ~3 GB of RAM to view. I've also compressed the ping response data into its own format down to about 150 MB. PM me for a link)
Here is a 2006 survey to compare.
Some observations: Big Tech (USA) is in the top left. US government allocations, for the most part, did not respond to any pings. And maybe you didn't realize this before, but Multicast (Class D) & Class E consume a whopping 12% of the IPv4 range.
about a month, since I ran it at about 6000 addresses / sec checking distinct addresses 4 times (round robin) or 1500 finished / sec. This was the fastest I went to avoid silent UDP drops and to hopefully not annoy my VPS hoster too much.
You might be interested in ZMap: With a 10gigE connection and either netmap or PF_RING, ZMap can scan the IPv4 address space in under 5 minutes.
Comparison is the thief of joy 🙃
Though if I push my scanner hard it could probably do 16k/sec on the single core and 1gig connection it is on. The problem is how reliably I could do 16k/sec over the network, since a good portion would be dropped even if the host's hardware could keep up.
I'd probably need access to enterprise-level equipment that could handle the routing load if I were to do it in 5 seconds lol, it's insane they managed to do that
Masscan was made for this as well ;)