Packet losses affect website how ?

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Posted by Energizer Bunny, 01-11-2008, 05:36 PM
How do packet losses affect running of a website, say i get packet loss for some site like around 30-40% but can still browse their websites, so how do packet losses affect working of a website ?
Posted by VINAX, 01-11-2008, 05:44 PM
For the normal/simple websites, it won't affect much, and you may not realize it. But if you streaming video/audio, VoIP or playing game, you will see it!
Posted by Energizer Bunny, 01-11-2008, 06:03 PM
So proxies should be down with small packet losses i am assuming, as i am not into gaming yet maybe one day again i will take up setting up gaming servers
Posted by fog, 01-11-2008, 06:03 PM
Lost" packets get retransmitted. (Well, over TCP.) Thus for things like e-mail and websites, they get retransmitted, so you just see slower load times, since 30-40% (in your case) of the data sent needs to be resent. (There's also some latency: the sending host sends it and waits for an acknowledgment... It eventually sees that no acknowledgment comes and resends it... It's usually a fraction of a second, but it's still not exactly something you want to happen.) So no data is *lost*, as much as just delayed.
Posted by layer0, 01-11-2008, 06:13 PM
How are you measuring packet loss? If via traceroute, ping, etc. there may not actually be any "real" packet loss, just dropped ICMP packets which is normal given they're often a low priority.
Posted by Energizer Bunny, 01-11-2008, 06:15 PM
Using command like ping -t blablablahost.com
Posted by psyxakias, 01-13-2008, 03:04 AM
Then you should probably listen to layer0. Windows' Ping uses ICMP packets which get low priority or even rate-limited in lots of ISPs. There are even sites that completely block ICMPs, 100% packetloss, that doesn't mean they're down Additionally, as it was correctly mentioned TCP packets get re-transmitted but with 30-40% packetloss, visited sites will be seriously slow and may have timeouts as well.