If all you want to do is know if a site is up, and get the ip, then why don't you just open a socket, and close it immediately when the sockopen event triggers, storing the ip property from $sock?
Or if you just want to get the ip, and see if the site exists, why not just /dns <url> and catch the results with the on dns event.
My point is, does it really need to be a ping? Because your icmp alias only wants to see if the host exists or not, so you could use other/easier methods, as the ones mentioned above.
God, open 3 or 4 socks every 5 or 10 second would be muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch more dispendious, there is no comparison to me.
