This counter reports a live, instantaneous receive rate in bytes per second for this PM instance, sampled at the moment of the read rather than accumulated over everything accumulated since the last manual clear. Because it is a rate rather than a running total, it is the figure to poll for catching a short-lived spike or confirming current throughput in near real time, complementing the cumulative Accepted/Yellow/Dropped counters reported in the general life-to-date running counter for this metric, which an operator can zero with a manual clear -- which is why a clear-time field is defined alongside it, which only tell you what already happened rather than what is happening at this instant. For instance, polling this value every few seconds as exposed through the Stats bin and watching it climb toward the service's provisioned rate in megabits per second confirms a suspected surge is happening right now, rather than waiting for it to show up after the fact in the interval totals.