RE: Any good method to check network overload?

[swin <swin () student dlut edu cn>]

   You all misunderstood me! what I want isn't a tool to check network
flow or just want to have it report.
   I'm doing a research  to find a good model to judge if network
is overload automaticlly,it may be a good algorithm but not a tool.no 
matter to use ntop or mrtg, it just give a  statistic of network flow,
this is not hard to achive.but my problem is how to  judge network 
overload in real-time and offer a countermeasure ,but not a monitor tool.
   David give a suggestion to check time delay in pinging,but I think this
is not reliable.as we known ,we can get the data in realtime just like intop can do,but with this data how can we say 
at certain time the network
is overloaded ,what we need is a benchmark to decide if it is overloaded,
but what should this benchmark be and how to get this benchmark are the
problems.
   I don't know if I have explain it clearly,but I do holp get suggestions
of it form others.

        Swin. Wang.