> Is it indicating that the router is faster at forwarding packets than responding to ping requests? I believe most of the time this is the reason indeed. Answ

> Is it indicating that the router is faster at forwarding packets than responding to ping requests? I believe most of the time this is the reason indeed. Answering an ICMP error to a TTL expiration or to an echo request is very low priority. This latency in error message generation may even be a better signal of the router load than the latency of the actualy trip through it.