Buggy network connection causes very low system responsiveness

[Martin Sourada]

Hi,

first, I am not entirely sure this the right list for this kind of
issue, so I apologise in advance in case it isn't. And now for the
problem:

At home I am connected to home network, most of the time wireless, but
when wired the issue seems to be same. The connection of the home
network to outside is quite buggy and traffic drops quite often to zero
or near zero values, and sometimes the connection is even lost (it's via
wifi, unfortunately with low visibility to the router we connect to). 

What bugs me is that when the connection is in its near-dead state my
Fedora is very low responsive. For example I tried to open terminal (via
key shortcut) and it didn't pop up at least for ten seconds, and then
instantly when I disabled my network connections. This low
responsiveness happens whenever the traffic drops to zero or near zero
(and a lot of packets is lost). CPU load is at normal during the 'lags'.
Also already loaded applications seems to behave decently.

My question is:

Is this behaviour to be expected or is it a bug? I don't know exactly
how these things work, but I fail to imagine how can network problems
affect system responsiveness...

Thanks for your thoughts,
Martin

Versions of the components I think might be relevant to this issue:
kernel-2.6.24.3-34.fc8
NetworkManager-0.7.0-0.6.7.svn3235.fc8
Gnome 2.20.3
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