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I recently discovered that latency increases when a download or upload is in progress on my DSL line, sometimes quite drastically. Initially I thought there was a fault on the line but discovered the same thing happening on several other connections. On some connections the latency would increase from 10ms to an average of 100ms while downloading and 800ms while uploading, whereas other lines increased by a smaller margin.
Why does consistent traffic seem to increase latency?
NOTE: I realise that an increase from 10ms to 800ms is an indication of there being something wrong with the line but I'm wondering why I noticed similar behavior on other lines, even when the variance wasn't so high.
It doesn't or it shouldn't. What is happening is the data your sending is being send on a saturated upstream/downstream which means the data is simply slower. Latency measure how long a packet took to be reach. Smaller packets wouldn't have latency in your example – Ramhound – 2014-01-19T22:57:48.747