Rttvar has grown to over 2.3 seconds, decreasing to 2.0

The Round-Trip Time Variation (rttvar) represents the variance in the round-trip time (RTT) of packets sent over a network. It is a measure of the network’s congestion and can impact the overall performance of data transmission.

In your case, the rttvar value has grown to over 2.3 seconds. This suggests an increase in network congestion, resulting in longer packet delays and potentially affecting the responsiveness of your network applications.

However, you mentioned that the rttvar has subsequently decreased to 2.0 seconds. This can indicate a reduction in network congestion, leading to improved performance and shorter packet delays.

To better understand this, let’s consider an example. Imagine you have a web server hosting a website. When a user accesses a webpage, their computer sends a request packet to the server. The server then responds with the webpage data in a series of packets. The user’s computer measures the time it takes for each request packet to go to the server and for each response packet to come back, calculating the RTT.

Now, if there are many users simultaneously accessing the website or if there is high network traffic, the congestion increases, causing longer round-trip times. This elevated rttvar value (over 2.3 seconds) indicates such congestion. However, if the congestion subsides or the network conditions improve, the rttvar value can decrease to 2.0 seconds or even lower.

Overall, monitoring the rttvar can help identify network congestion issues and optimize network performance. By analyzing this metric, you can take appropriate measures such as adjusting network configurations, allocating more bandwidth, or implementing traffic management techniques to mitigate congestion and ensure efficient data transmission.