Question : Problem: Ping to Gateway shows varies from 3ms up to 16ms - Should only be 1ms, right?

Hello Guy's,

Need some creative troubleshooting help here.  My boss is too cheap to pay for anything and can't spell I.T.

My environment -

I have a 4 3Com 4500 switch's in a stacked configuration.  I have a flat network, one VLAN.  I have a DMZ Vlan and a old Checkpoint FW.  The switch is the Gateway at .1  The FW is .254.

When I ping the gateway from the inside, my ping vaires from 3ms to 15ms but never at 1ms (I think it was at one point?)  When I ping the FW at .254 I get 1ms reply constant.  When I ping Yahoo or my ISP DNS server I get ping's of around 50ms up to 80ms or so...seems ok.

I have rebooted the switch many times.

What are my options of further troubleshooting this?  Again, I can't spend any money...any free tools?  Why would pinging the gateway be slower than pinging the the FW or any other host for that matter?

Does anyone know the 3com 4500 switch well?  Any logs I can search in there?

Thanks!

Answer : Problem: Ping to Gateway shows varies from 3ms up to 16ms - Should only be 1ms, right?

This isn't a problem.  The switch simply sets ICMP targeted  to itself as low priority which is why a ping to the switch varies but a ping through the switch (to the firewall) is 1ms.