Thanks for engaging with this. I was intentionally brief in my explanation. I have observed this behavior in congested networks for years and ignored it as an obvious symptom of the congestion. What has always piqued my curiosity though is just how long a ping can last.
In my case yesterday, I was at the airport at peak holiday travel and free wifi usage time. I expect a bad experience. I don't expect a ping to return 5 seconds after originating it. I just imagine the network straining and groaning to get my ping back to me. It's okay, man. Let it go. On Thu, Dec 22, 2022 at 5:22 AM Masataka Ohta < mo...@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> wrote: > Jerry Cloe wrote: > > > Because there is no standard for discarding "old" traffic, only > > discard is for packets that hop too many times. There is, however, a > > standard for decrementing TTL by 1 if a packet sits on a device for > > more than 1000ms, and of course we all know what happens when TTL > > hits zero. Based on that, your packet could have floated around for > > another 53 seconds. > > Totally wrong as the standard says TTL MUST be decremented at least > by one on every hop and TTL MAY NOT be decremented further as is > specified by the standard of IPv4 router requirements (rfc1812): > > When a router forwards a packet, it MUST reduce the TTL by at least > one. If it holds a packet for more than one second, it MAY decrement > the TTL by one for each second. > > As for IPv6, > > Unlike IPv4, IPv6 nodes are not required to enforce maximum packet > lifetime. That is the reason the IPv4 "Time to Live" field was > renamed "Hop Limit" in IPv6. In practice, very few, if any, IPv4 > implementations conform to the requirement that they limit packet > lifetime, so this is not a change in practice. > > Masataka Ohta > >
