An RTO occurs when the sender is missing too many acknowledgments and decides to take a time out and stop sending altogether. After some amount of time, usually at least one second, the sender cautiously starts sending again, testing the waters with just one packet at first, then two packets, and so on. As a result, an RTO causes, at minimum, a one-second delay on your network. We’ve seen sites that show millions of RTOs in a 24-hour window, with one million RTOs translating to 277 hours of application delay. High levels of RTOs can negatively impact overall application performance. Learn more about how to troubleshoot these problems and identify the root cause of RTOs.