Abstract—Peer-to-peer relaying is commonly used in realtime applications to cope with NAT and firewall restrictions and provide better quality network paths. As relaying is not natively supported by the Internet, it is usually implemented at the application layer. Also, in a modern operating system, the processor is shared, so the receive-process-forward process for each relay packet may take a considerable amount of time if the host is busy handling some other tasks. Thus, if we happen to select a loaded relay node, the relaying may introduce significant delays to the packet transmission time and even degrade the application performance. In this work, based on an extensive set of Internet traces, we pursue an understanding of the processing delays incurred at relay nodes and their impact on the application performance. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) we propose a methodology for measuring the processing delays at any relay node on the Internet; 2) we characterize the workload p...