Hi Jweaver,

Thanks for writing into the forum!

Without seeing your data it's hard to be 100% certain but from what you describe it sounds like you hit the nail on the head!

Some routers are configured to down-prioritize ICMP echo requests where the TTL = 0 when it reaches the router and instead prioritizes "Real" traffic. They'll generally pass the packet along just fine but will drop it and won't respond if there is too much traffic. See this article for more details.

Some devices also have a Denial of Service mechanism that can get triggered if they determine that they're getting rapidly bombarded by ICMP packets from the same IP address. This sounds likely in your case since it settled down after changing the Interval to 5 seconds.

The most important thing is the final hop, if there's packet loss or high latency at the final hop then you need to trace it back through the route to see where it originates. If the final hop is good you can disregard all of the other packet loss and latency since it's likely due to the previously mentioned behavior.

Let me know if this leaves you with any questions!

Thanks,

-Poe