Out of curiosity, why does it often take seconds to obtain network configuration via DHCP when the CPU is capable of processing millions of operations per second and ping to the router takes a couple of milliseconds?
In my home environment with one WiFi router and about 5 devices, it is not rare to see times like 5-10 seconds.
Best Answer
In addition to the actual acquisition of the DHCP lease from the DHCP server (which typically doesn't take very long), some servers will first ping the IP address it's about to hand out before it actually hands it out to verify that it's not already in use on the network - this takes a few seconds to time out. The client sometimes will do the same (again, to prevent IP address conflicts) which will add some more time. Then, on top of that, some clients will also register their DNS entries etc.