hobbitping latency reporting with multiple hosts

[<nick.nauwelaerts (at) thomsonreuters.com>]

Hello,
We are having some discrepancies with the latencies xymon reports in
it's conn tests as opposed to what we were seeing in other monitoring
programs. What we're seeing is that xymon reports a much higher latency
for certain hosts than what we're used to. We are using hobbitping from
xymon 4.2.2 on x64, novell suse linux enterprise server 10 sp2.

We think we've tracked it down to the following:

We are testing with 3 hosts:
194.109.6.92 - www.xs4all.nl
195.130.131.39 - www.telenet.be
212.27.48.10 - www.free.fr

These are used as an example, but our real world tests with internal
hosts show the same issue. Anyway, when we ping each of these hosts we
don't see any issue:

% ./hobbitping 194.109.6.92
194.109.6.92 is alive (6 ms)
./hobbitping 195.130.131.39
195.130.131.39 is alive (2 ms)
% ./hobbitping 212.27.48.10
212.27.48.10 is alive (16 ms)

However, as soon as we start combining hosts we see strange results:
./hobbitping 195.130.131.39 194.109.6.92
195.130.131.39 is alive (22 ms)
194.109.6.92 is alive (6 ms)
./hobbitping 195.130.131.39 194.109.6.92 212.27.48.10
195.130.131.39 is alive (44 ms)
194.109.6.92 is alive (22 ms)
212.27.48.10 is alive (16 ms)

Even multiple tests on the same host show this:
% ./hobbitping 195.130.131.39 195.130.131.39 195.130.131.39
195.130.131.39 is alive (44 ms)
195.130.131.39 is alive (22 ms)
195.130.131.39 is alive (2 ms)


We've found a reference to someone who might have the same issue, but
there wasn't any follow up to that:
http://www.hswn.dk/hobbiton/2008/09/msg00188.html

Is anyone else seeing this issue?

thx

// nick