Out of curiosity, how is that measured across machines?

(The first thing that comes to my mind would be to use an oscilloscope with two probes, one to each machine, but I’m guessing that’s not it.)

Measure the round trip and divide by two for the approximate one way time. It'd be really neat to measure the time it takes for a packet to travel in one direction, but it's somewhere between hard and impossible[1]; a very short path has less room to be asymetric though.

[1] If the clocks are synchronized, you can measure send time on one end, and receive time on the other. But synchronizing clocks involves estimating the time it takes for signals to pass im each direction, typically assuming each direction takes half the round trip.