A system and method is provided for measuring network round trip time by monitoring
fast-response operations at one network endpoint, typically a client computer.
A client computer of the system includes a network monitoring and analysis engine
which monitors a sent packet for a fast-response operation. If a fast-response
operation is detected, then the client computer assumes a server computer processed
the packet substantially instantaneously. Thus, the processing time at the server
computer is neglected as zero. The round trip time can then be approximated as
the difference in time between when the client computer sent the packet and when
the client computer received the response packet.