For the past couple of weeks, we've been getting bursts of excessively high latency out to the network. It takes as long as 8 seconds for the gateway machine, the first host on Pacbell's side of the DSL, to turn pings around to us. It's not dropping a lot of packets, it's just taking its sweet time with them.

When examining a graph of the latency at a fairly high resolution, I can see a pattern, a 6-to-8-second cycle where it jumps up past 5000ms delay then quickly ramps down to a more reasonable delay. That's the response to a series of pings sent at one-second intervals, so when you think about it that means it's holding all the pings it receives for a few seconds, then responding to them all at once. When graphed, it's a pretty high-quality "down sawtooth": |\|\|\|\|\

You see where this is going, right? What does it sound like if I take the latency graph, DC-filter it, and play it as audio, time compressing about 3600:1 (1 hour = 1 second) to shift it into an audible frequency?

I'll let you know.