Your network is hurting your application experience

A few times a year I get addicted to Xbox. Once the kids go to sleep, I can easily spend hours playing Mass Effect, Fallout or Assassin’s Creed.

The games are wonderful and immersive, which is why I spent over 100 hours playing Fallout 3 and another 100+ hours in Fallout New Vegas.  Unfortunately, I’ve experienced some annoying things with these games.  I’ll be in one of the final battles of Mass Effect 3 against the Reapers when the game starts stuttering.  Do you know how hard it is to aim when the system stutters?

Game stuttering, system stuttering or application stuttering is a great way to severely hurt the user experience. How can we reduce app stutters? We need to look at the underlying reason for the stuttering and figure out how to correct.

Network latency and packet loss is a big reason why users might experience stuttering in an application. If a packet gets lost or a packet times out due to high latency, that packet must be retransmitted.  Retransmissions take time. And if you experience a lot of retransmissions, you experience a lot of application stutters.

We’ve already seen how Citrix’s Adaptive Transport impacts

1. File Copying
2. Video Viewing

But what does it do to the application experience? See for yourself

Daniel (Follow on Twitter @djfeller)
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