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1

Oh god, I hope not. RTT has never been an accurate predictor of end-to-end
performance. (Just ask anyone who bought into ping-based global server load
balancing.) ASPATH length is almost as bad (as a predictor) as RTT.

well, it's the way icmp_echo is handeld in some vendor routers and
sometime also the poor implementation of an IP stack on the echoing
device which is a problem.

no, that is not the problem. oh i admit that ping time jitter is ~random.
but even if it weren't, RTT doesn't drive performance, (bw*delay)-loss does.

2

RTT doesn't drive performance, (bw*delay)-loss does.

FWIW, the heavily interactive apps are more affected by RTT than they are
by bandwidth. Network games are the new TELNET. They despise varying
latency levels, and are generally oblivious to bandwidth. Your point is
still mostly valid, in that the only thing they hate more than varying
latency is packet loss, but if the network isn't losing packets then RTT
does affect "perfomance" for the heavily interactive apps.

Yours in hyper-technicality,

Eric