We describe a series of system measurements investigating the performance of a burst-mode or transient-suppressed (TS)-EDFA, specifically designed to reduce the impact of gain transients in dynamic optical networks. We assess the performance of this TS-EDFA in a variety of network contexts. We compare the performance of the TS-EDFA with conventional amplifiers (C-EDFAs) and show its compatibility with supplementary gain control techniques. Finally, we measure gain-transient accumulation along long links using a recirculating transmission loop and show that, for packet-transmission, the number of hops is limited by accumulated transients for a C-EDFA, but limited by accumulated noise for the TS-EDFA.