Shoutout to the network engineer in Austin who told me to stop chasing latency and look at jitter instead

I was banging my head against a wall for weeks trying to fix packet drops on a regional MPLS link between Dallas and Houston. The engineer at our carrier took one look at my pings and said "dude, your average latency is fine but your jitter is all over the place, you need to check your buffer settings." Has anyone else had a similar issue where the obvious metric wasnt the real problem?

2 comments

2 Comments

davidwright25d ago

Was it really causing problems or just bugging you?

blakecampbell24d ago

You say "causing problems" like it has to be screaming at you to be annoying though lol. I had a neighbor who played music at a low level but the bass would rattle my pictures every single night. It wasn't breaking anything but it made my living room feel like I was living in a club 24/7. Sometimes the small stuff is just as bad because it grinds you down over time.