Procurve V Netgear ping times

[dave.81]

Not sure what to make of the following so thought i'd post it on here...

We have a range of Procurve switches and some older Netgear smartswitches around site. We have been having some strange issues recently and have been looking at the ping times to the procurve and netgear switches.

Procurve get <1ms, netgear are getting anywhere from 8ms upto 400/500ms. The only time i get more on a procurve is when it is on the other side of a netgear switch, getting an average of 4ms.

Should i make anything of this at all, should i be urgently looking at replacing the netgear hardware? Or could it just be a red herring?

[Soulfish]

It sounds like the Netgear switches are having a hard time coping with traffic flow, and so are taking a while to respond to the ping request. Remember that ICMP packets have the lowest priority so will be dealt with last. Have you looked at the number of packets/amount of bandwidth that the Netgear switches are receiving?

[Duke]

Funny that - we use Allied Telesis switches almost exclusively (60+) and their ping times are always <1ms unless under major load. For a project a couple of years back a provider fitted a couple of 24-port Gb HP ProCurve switches and at best they pinged 5ms, often much higher at 500ms-800ms. I couldn't pin-point any particular issue with them, and I checked they were on the latest firmware, but it didn't exactly impress me.

Check all the STP/RSTP settings on the switches, that can mess with all kinds of traffic in obscure ways. If they look right then maybe log a case with NetGear and see if they consider it an issue. What kind of problems have you been having that might be related to this?

Chris