[colug-432] Packet Loss

[Rob Funk]

On Monday, October 10, 2011 10:26:14 am Thomas W. cranston wrote:
> Wondering why I am getting packet loss between my laptop and Linksys
> wireless router.

A little packet loss occasionally is a good thing. Google for "bufferbloat".

Beyond that, you really need a *long* run of pings to really get valid data. 
4 just tells you there's something at the other end. 16 is a start, but 160 
is better.

But it's possible that there's other traffic using the bandwidth (I learned 
this way that PulseAudio has a nasty bug that can cause multicast floods), 
or possibly a bug in either the access point or your laptop.

tcpdump might give you a clue, if the problem is other traffic.

I ended up buying a USB spectrum analyzer to find out what was going on with 
my network. (It was less than $100 at Micro Center.)  That mainly showed me 
when things were bad; tcpdump was what pointed to multicast pulseaudio as 
the culprit.