[cisco-bba] Frame Relay Latency

[Chris Moody, CCNP CCDA]

I'm working at a customer's site to try and diagnose latency on their
frame-relay links.  I am not very familiar with Frame so am looking for
suggestions.

Their "cloud" consists of several 2600 and 3640 routers all connected
via pvcs back to their core router.  Each of the frame links is 192k or
greater.

The issue they are seeing is that when someone does, say a file copy to
a remote server...the ping response times jump from the low 20ms range
all the way up to over 500ms.  I have poked and prodded to find a cause
for the jump in latency and am somewhat stumped...simply because I've
not dealt with frame before.  I'm not seeing any errors or loss of
frames...and debug commands have not shed any light on circuit issues. 
Basically it appears to me as if the lines are good.  The interface
utilization sits around 50/255 for both tx & rx...which I was under the
understanding is not a saturated link.

I'm thining they are going to need some form of queueing implemented on
the frame(serial) interfaces on these guys to provide QoS...but wanted
to get suggestions/ideas before I researched further.

Cheers,

~Chris