In a fully wired VMware lab using a virtual Palo Alto (PANOS 8.1.14-h2) VM-50 I could see really rather high latency:

That did not make sense for a wired LAN. After some internet based digging I found this:

Is higher latency normal on a VM compared to hardware?

This referred to some rare issues with virtual Esxi Palo Alto’s and intel’s DPDK. Following the referenced link takes you to a Palo Alto support page showing you how to disable the DPDK which as it states in enabled as default. It also mentions you need one of the following drivers:

In my case I using ne1000:

Clearly not supported with DPDK. So after disabling:

set system setting dpdk-pkt-io off

We can see the ping times to the firewall interface have drastically dropped: