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Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

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Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#61

Post by singhrac »

xiii1408 wrote: post #20

Minor note---you can get much tighter theoretical minimum latencies than the ones listed in your table. 1. The table's mins divide straight line distance by the speed of light. This gives you the time it takes for light to travel in a straight line from, say, London to New York. However, your "real latencies" are roundtrip ("ping") latencies. Thus, you need to multiply all the theoretical latencies by two. 2. Data do…

Just as significant for HFT is that speed of light through air is significantly higher (3/2) than speed of light through glass.

Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#62

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Not Eugene OR. That's where my startup put their servers for a conference/collaboration tool. I remember getting a complaint from a customer in Jordan, trying to conference with a customer in India. They had something like 1sec latency, communicating through Eugene and back. Twice across the planet.

Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#63

Post by switch007 »

rsync wrote: post #56
switch007 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve nothing against Switzerland (it’s nice) but you’re the first person I’ve ever come across to suggest Zurich (or anywhere in Switzerland) as the coolest and most interesting place in Europe! I’m genuinely interested to hear more.

Yes, Zurich is pretty sleepy, but you need to factor in driving distances to skiing ... Zurich is very quick and convenient to any of Chamonix (straight west) Davos/St.Moritz (south), Cervina/Zermatt (southwest) or Südtirol (southeast).

Ah now it makes sense. I can definitely see the appeal for a skier :)

Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#64

Post by toast0 »

xiii1408 wrote: post #27
ksec wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so you're only 13% slower than the theoretical max. Yes. Not to mention those Fibre aren't exactly a straight line. There is extra distance for layering the fibre route. 13% is very close to practical maximum. That is why I asked [1] if we have Hollow Core Cable [2] soon where we get close to Real speed of light. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26026002 [2] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/fiber-optics/artic…

That sounds awesome. I would love to see lower latencies. Do you know if anyone's considering these for consumer Internet?

Assuming these cables cost more, or require equipment that costs more, I wouldn't expect this on last mile connections. ISPs simply don't care that much. DSL providers typically run connections with settings that add 15+ms of round trip. My DSL provider runs PPPoE for fiber connections where fiber is available, etc. When I was on AT&T fiber, it was still about 3-5 ms round trip to the first hop. It's been a while since I've experienced cable to know how they mess it up.

If there's significant deployment of the cable in long distance networks, eventually that should trickle down to users. It would probably happen faster if there were competitive local networks, but regardless, a significant drop in latency across a country or ocean can be big enough to justify some expense.

Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#65

Post by joshxyz »

Interesting problem really, for telegram bots I found Frankfurt Germany to be near their servers, which gives me almost instantaneous response.

For trading platforms it's fun monitoring latencies on websocket heartbeats, sometimes i get lucky and discover some platform is really nearby (e.g. 1ms to 3ms) which is very nice.

Still, nothing beats localhost as the fastest place on earth.

Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#66

Post by hinkley »

Johnny555 wrote: post #26
rsync wrote: post #12

Many years ago (2006 and 2009, respectively) I had to choose European and Asian locations for rsync.net storage arrays. My primary, overriding criteria in choosing locations was what would be the coolest, most interesting place to visit for installs and maintenance . I chose Zurich and Hong Kong. Measured results have exceeded my initial models.

The cloud ruined that fringe benefit, I used to manage servers in London and got to visit them quarterly. But now I manage servers all over the world, and it's impossible to see them physically, even the ones that are hosted nearby. Though all things considered, I don't really miss sitting inside a cold, loud datacenter or standing in front of a tiny KVM monitor for hours just to load CD's to do a software upgrade.

I annoyed my family by chiming in during The Martian about Donald Glover freezing his ass off in the server room:

He doesn't have to be cold! If he moved over one aisle he'd be nice and toasty!

Last time I was having to go into a server room, hot and cold aisles were still a new thing, so it was just cold everywhere.

Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#67

Post by hinkley »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #59
xiii1408 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a couple of things to note: 1. Submarine cables can't go in a straight line, since they've got to, you know, go down to the bottom of the ocean. (Which, you may have heard, is quite deep.) Also, a cable with a length of several thousand miles tends to have some slack. 2. Your packets may take a very curvy route from one city to another, even when they're not geographically that distant. This may be because your…

Debugging high ping at home once mtr (or similar, I think it was a graphical tool) showed the first 5 or 6 hops all in the ISPs network and taking about ⅔ of the time; going from UK to USA and then leaving their network in Amsterdam IIRC only to terminate at another data-center in UK. Pretty crazy. Ha, it only just struck me that could have been an NSA-type routing issue!?!

That reminds me of the bug in Google Maps where a route from southern Sweden to Norway suggested driving through the Chunnel and taking a car ferry across from Scotland.

Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#68

Post by jackjackk0 »

On the related github repo:

"If you just want to see what I did, best to read the makefile directly."

Sometimes I'm amazed by the power of a good makefile that allows replicating a perhaps fairly complex set of inter-dependent targets. I wish this approach was used more in academic research, even though fitting data analysis and modelling within a standard makefile can get tricky (e.g. some passages going through remote cluster computing, some models involving large number of files that would need to be listed as dependencies)

Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#69

Post by chokeartist »

sandworm101 wrote: post #52
danaliv wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For point 1, is the depth of the ocean significant compared to the distances traversed? My back-of-the-envelope math suggests it’s less than half a percent for a cable from New York to England. (6 miles down + 6 miles up, divided by rough great circle distance of 2600 nautical miles.) I would think a bigger factor would be that the cables (IIRC) don't go in straight lines (which you did allude to).

Correct. The ocean bottom is relatively flat once away from the continents. Also, the submarine cable actually has a very slight advantage over a surface cable as at several thousand feet below it is following a slightly smaller radius curve. I'm waiting for the HFT firm to bore a literally strait hole between London and New York. Then we know that HFT has gone too far.

> I'm waiting for the HFT firm to bore a literally strait hole between London and New York. Then we know that HFT has gone too far.

No need. They have Starlink now (or soon).

Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?

#70

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #59
xiii1408 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a couple of things to note: 1. Submarine cables can't go in a straight line, since they've got to, you know, go down to the bottom of the ocean. (Which, you may have heard, is quite deep.) Also, a cable with a length of several thousand miles tends to have some slack. 2. Your packets may take a very curvy route from one city to another, even when they're not geographically that distant. This may be because your…

Debugging high ping at home once mtr (or similar, I think it was a graphical tool) showed the first 5 or 6 hops all in the ISPs network and taking about ⅔ of the time; going from UK to USA and then leaving their network in Amsterdam IIRC only to terminate at another data-center in UK. Pretty crazy. Ha, it only just struck me that could have been an NSA-type routing issue!?!

The internet is supposed to be self-healing but the ISP routes are sometimes hella-dumb.

More than once I have seen a traceroute that takes you from Miami, down to Argentina and then back up to Cali.

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