tcp timelines with ggplot2

I’ve come across the need to analyze TCP flows from time to time, and while scripts like flowtime and EasyTimeline are nice, they aren’t really, well, pretty.  ggplot2, on the other hand is, and it turns out to be really easy to get nice, somewhat useful plots. Here’s an example conversation between my local browser and nytimes.com: (warning, gigantic) You can easily see the importance of fast DNS resolution, with almost 2 seconds of time spent idle waiting for the first resolver hit.  Then we see a large number of connections opened up, as modern browsers and sites try to work around the small TCP initial congestion window.  Finally there’s the petering out of the connections and the final FIN packets as the browser finishes the page. It’s at least slightly more informative then staring at wireshark dumps, and it provides another excuse to practice my R. The code is pretty straightforward, and mostly dedicated to munging the tshark field output to make streams show up in a reasonable way:

View the code on Gist.