The "spoon-feeding problem", as it was recently explained to me, happens when connections to your application server are tied up feeding data across slow network connections to your clients. This makes sense to me and now I understand the importance of putting a highly-concurrent proxy in front of my app servers.
My question is, how did the first person to recognize this problem figure it out? What *nix tools and troubleshooting techniques would help me to recognize this problem if I hadn't had it explained to me?