router latency issues

hi ,
i need a lil help to decipher this !!!! i connected two 3600 series routers (back to back) ..... and logged into one of them via console.

I had connected them via serial interface and configured them for connectivity... i then pinged my local interface ...it gave me a latency of around 8ms (avg.)

i then pinged the remote interface and got a latency of 4ms (avg.)

Now how did this happen ??? i thought the latency in this case should have been higher....

Most cisco devices put icmp on a low priority, which runs off the cpu. I have seen pings to router interfaces show some interesting results when a ping to a host on the other side of the device came back at minimal latency. You might be seeing this. Actual traffic being forwarded by the device is done on the procs of the line cards and not by the primary cpu of the device.

N8