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# of outstanding packets indicator

 Shows whether dialup-connection packets are vanishing into the aether
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While it's not necessarily possible to do much to remedy a dial-up connection when it gets bad, it would be nice to have an indicator to show how many packets had been sent but not yet acknowleged. When things are flowing smoothly, this number would generally be pretty small, but as soon as a connection starts getting poor it would start rising.

With a little more work, this could be improved by having a display showing how many outstanding packets are at least 1 second old, how many are at least 5 seconds old, etc. Sometimes for some reason my system seems to get "stuck" trying to connect to a web site and other http accesses have to wait for that first one to fail even though telnet keeps working smoothly. An indicator that one packet was "logjamming" many others might provide a good indication to close the browser window whose packet is "stuck".

—supercat, Jun 30 2000

ntop http://www.ntop.org/ntop.html
[egnor, Jun 30 2000, last modified Oct 05 2004]

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       see the "Queue" column in output from "netstat -i" on your favorite UNIX box. Is that what you mean?
—johan, Jul 01 2000
   

       Similarly, WindowsNT and Win2k both have a performance monitor that allows you to log and/or chart this kind of info.
—GeneticCrypto, Sep 18 2000
   

       I don't buy your "logjamming" theory, unless we're seeing an artifact of HTTP/1.1 persistent connections.
—egnor, Sep 18 2000
   

       Maybe logjamming is a euphemism for a 56k dialup.
—GeneticCrypto, Sep 18 2000
   

       I often see something like this in connection with DNS lookups. Seems like my browser, even though it can deal with multiple windows having multiple connections, only does one DNS-lookup at a time.
—jutta, Apr 24 2004
   

       jutta: I hadn't thought of the DNS as being a bottleneck, but I think you may be right. I can easily see how a DNS lookup to a non-existent network could cause a major holdup in other networking processes.
—supercat, Apr 26 2004
   

       Yes, in fact the "speedup" software currently advertised by many ISPs (AOL, EarthLink, NetZero), in part achieves its goal by speeding up DNS lookups.
—krelnik, Apr 26 2004
   
      
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