packet loss
termnetworking
Packets that never arrive - discarded by a full queue, corrupted in transit, or dropped by policy.
Small percentages do disproportionate damage, because loss is the signal congestion control listens to: one per cent loss can halve a transfer's throughput, since the sender treats it as instruction to slow down. That also means loss is not always a fault to eliminate - a network that never drops is usually one that buffers instead, and the resulting delay is worse for interactive traffic than the drops would have been.
Also known as: drops