10+ms ping time across network

[Joel Hanger]

hey all,
	I got a question. (What else is new ;)  
I was just doing some monitoring and noticed that my network
performance seems descent but not what it was.. I seem to remember
getting less than 2ms, often it was less than 1ms, but lately, it's 
been in the 10ms range, hopping around from 9-12ms.  I'm running RH
6.1 on a P166, 64MB ram, 10BT, across a 3com 10BT hub. It's running
as the gateway, firewall, SMB PDC, web/ftp/ssh server.  I checked to 
see if there were any processes that decided to go haywire and all 
looks good.. except one peculiarity.. when I installed and ran apache
I was able to configure how many instances of the server I wanted.. 
I reduced that to 2, but I notice that I have multiple... 10+ instances
of in.inetd.. is there a way to reduce that and could that be the reason
it has slowed?  Thanks in advance

Joel