[I took this direct...]
If you are busy, you are busy, right?
Not. Different pieces of hardware are busy in those cases.
Thanks for the education..
Er. There's no such thing as perfect transport as long as TCP is concerned. If end-hosts support large windows, even a single TCP session will load the network to the point where it'll lose packets.
What you say here makes sense to me. But, out of a 500 ping sample over the course of half a day, I was getting well below one percent loss -- six months ago. Now, my same sample group is going for more than three percent, with many ten percent loss routes showing. This has changed and has changed commensurately with the throughput problems shown in TCP and name lookup problems via UDP. It may not be scientific proof, but it could very well be a good scientific indicator. An indicator is all I really need for the most part.