Section 7.4. Network Saturation

7.4. Network Saturation

A network card that is sent more traffic than it can send in an interval queues data in various buffers, including the TCP buffer. This causes application delays as the network card clears the backlog.

An important point is that while your system may not be saturated, something else on the network may be. Often your network traffic will pass through several hops, any of which may be experiencing problems.