Network jitter refers to fluctuations in measured latency — and thus stability — across a given network from one data stream to the next. Packet loss, network congestion, network instability, routing patterns, and aging hardware components can cause network jitter. While this impact is quantifiable, excess jitter also creates a perception of network slowness or glitchiness.
While each service has its own sensitivity to jitter, various types of services have acceptable jitter ranges that help determine overall quality of service (QoS). For example, the response-time needs for financial transactions (which should be as instantaneous as possible) or phone calls are much more stringent than those for OTA OS updates. Speed and consistency are key.
People often equate jitter with ping, but these metrics are unique. Ping measures the time delay in transmission of ICMP packets and their echo responses, which help determine the overall performative health of the network. Conversely, jitter encompasses variations in delivery speed, packet loss, and packet retransmissions that signal network performance.
How does network jitter work?
Network administrators and users strive for reliable, consistent, and performant packet delivery to drive positive user experiences — and transmit important data quickly. This requires one packet to arrive in roughly the same time as the previous packet, in a state where reassembly happens seamlessly at the network layer. Jitter also looks at packet delivery rates expressed in percentages, as poor delivery can cause issues.
When high jitter strikes, users might experience freezing video during a Zoom call, laggy performance while online gaming, or unpredictable, split-second streaming interruptions that hamper the viewing experience.
This is also partially dependent on the internet protocol carrying those data packets. While TCP is lauded for its error-free and synchronous packet transmission, a protocol such as UDP (which sacrifices some reliability for speed) might be more sensitive to network jitter.
In any case, there are tools available that can assess jitter by sending test packets and timestamping them. It's possible to look at average jitter (measured over a time interval or number of packets), maximum jitter, and peak-to-peak jitter — which compares the highest and lowest overall readouts plus the time elapsed between those peaks.
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Does HAProxy help with jitter?
Yes! HAProxy One — the world's fastest application delivery and security platform — ensures optimal traffic routing and packet delivery for any application, API, or AI/LLM service. Working as load balancer and reverse proxy, HAProxy Enterprise bundles best-in-class UDP datagram delivery rates (to name an example) while limiting resource consumption and network congestion.
To learn more about jitter reduction in HAProxy, check out our application acceleration solution and our HAProxy Enterprise datasheet.