This counter reports a live, instantaneous receive rate in frames 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, this rate spiking into the tens of thousands of frames per second (as reported through the Stats bin) while the matching BasicRxBytesPerSec barely moves would point to a flood of very small packets, such as a SYN-flood-style event, rather than an ordinary large data transfer.