How Does Packet Loss and Delay Affect Performance?

When troubleshooting some performance issues with a client the other day, I was explaining that any packet loss or delay will affect your performance. The question is how much loss or delay are you willing to tolerate, or how much of a performance hit are you willing to take before you investigate?
Since packet loss and delay is hard to recreate, I used my Linktrophy Mini wan emulator from Apposite Technologies (https://www.apposite-tech.com/products/linktropy) to help me out. Any wan emulator where you can change the loss and delay will do. An alternative is to modify your VMWARE workstation Network Adapter Advanced Settings.

I explained to the client throughput is a fairly general term and the first thing I need to do is define what I’m measuring to avoid confusion. For example, using iperf to measure network performance is totally different than copying a file to your network drive using SMB. In the ‘real word’ you have all sorts of items that impact performance. For example, distance/equipment/processing latency cabling errors, interference. Then there are techniques to mitigate performance loss like full duplex communication, multiple flows, hardware level encryption non mechanical drives, etc.
In this example, I used iperf to measure the impact of network throughput while introducing latency and loss.
The point of the test is to make you aware of what can impact your performance, tools and methodologies you can consider and most importantly, get out there and test stuff?
 
The results are fairly self-explanatory as you can see from the table below.

I tried to use conservative numbers, but always encourage you to figure out your specific values to get more accurate findings.