This counter counts how many times the LANCE Ethernet receiver lost all or part of an incoming packet because there was no memory buffer available before its internal silo filled up. For an administrator, a growing value means the receive side, not the network, is the bottleneck, since the hardware itself is dropping frames before they even reach protocol processing. For example, a spike in this counter during a traffic burst suggests the node needs more receive buffers or faster buffer allocation, independent of any link errors reported elsewhere.