Comment by angry_octet
10 years ago
Chrome or other applications won't be aware of what is happening way down below at layer 2. To layer 3 (TCP) the pause is indistinguishable from severe network congestion.
Just speculating, but the stop/start oscillation in traffic rate could cause code running in chrome, such as a video codec, to exercise parts of its re-buffering code in a way that exposes a bug.
mplayer does same thing on streams when other side abruptly goes away, it hangs for ~5-10 second before closing.