Locating the Source of High Latency

In some cases, packet loss may not be the cause of latency. You may find that even though communications between two hosts are slow, that slowness doesn’t show the common symptoms of TCP retransmissions or duplicate ACKs. In cases such as these, you need another technique to locate the source of the high latency.

One of the most effective ways to find the source of high latency is to examine the initial connection handshake and the first couple of packets that follow it. For example, consider a simple connection between a client and a web server as the client attempts to browse a site hosted on the web server. The portion of this communication sequence we are concerned with is the first six packets, consisting ...

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