Jan 2003 on Internet mailing list http://www.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/2003-January/002720.html I believe (based solely on a single long-ago observation that an M/M/1/K queuing model seemed to predict the measured behaviour of core routers with short buffers pretty accurately) that the speculation in your third sentence above may in fact be true. To relate this to another recent thread on this list, however, this seems like one of those things that should require no speculation since it is not so difficult to measure, yet I know of no good-quality data from "typical" core circuits which has been published anywhere. The network we've built is constructed with insufficient instrumentation to enable us to understand what it is we've built with any certainty, so we speculate. ---- dennis@juniper.net