I'm currently trying to troubleshoot an issue with my network in which I get latency spikes up to 200 seconds (normally around 50 secs) in an apparently random way at apparently random moments of the day.

While trying to find what part of my messy network needs to be blamed (outside of the scope of this question - discussed a bit on chat), I realized I have no reliable way to confirm that a change actually improved anything.

So far, the main way in which i notice this is that irssi shows [Lag: 15 (??)] in the statusbar, increasing every 5 seconds, and all other connections seem to be affected too. Since this depends on my observations, it's not a very reliable method to know how often it really happens.

Note that just sending ICMP pings is probably not enough, but that's just my guess. It might be a "bufferbloat" issue, it might be packet loss, it might only apply to persistent connections. I suspect this because a few months ago, when the issue started, I had a "ping" command running in background and it didn't show anything weird at all during the latency spikes. This seems to have changed now (pings don't go through), but still, I'd prefer something more robust.