The diagram itself (http://research.swtch.com/tcpviz.png ) looks like an optical illusion - does anyone else feel like the horizontal stripes are actually sloping downwards?
Yes I did. The closest commonly listed illusion I can find is the Zöllner illusion[1], but that uses uniformly lengthed, angled short lines in differing directions to make parallel lines look unparallel. This uses a biased saw-tooth to create the impression that the trend of the line gradually curves down. I wonder if it has a name.
Interesting effect. It could be used nicely in many graphic design contexts, although probably more subtly than demonstrated here.
Awesome visualization! This is embarrassing to admit but I didn't know that on establishing a connection there's 2 distinct stages: "ramp-up" and "full bandwidth". Is this characteristic of every connection post-handshake? Could someone be kind enough to explain what is happening exactly in the video after the handshake?
Somewhat similarly, visualizing web server traffic (from the access logs) can be done with Logstalgia: https://code.google.com/p/logstalgia/. Enlightening to see your web server play Pong against an army of clients firing requests at the server...
