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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?

#81

Post by cycomanic »

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…

What do you mean by cosine losses? I have done research in fibre optics for more than a decade and never heard that term. Also I have no idea what you mean by light bends around the fibre. A simple explanation of light propagation in multi-mode fibres can use geometric optics to explain how light propagates along the fibre by reflecting of the interface between core and cladding, however this simple picture does not apply to single-mode fibre (which all long distance connections are) and also does not easily explain the group velocities in fibre.

The reason that light travels slower in fibre is because the refractive index of slica is about 1.5 while it is 1 in glass (in reality it's a bit more complicated, it's the group index that counts, which is also approx. 1.5 however).

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

#82

Post by rjsw »

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).

I wouldn't call Zurich particularly close to any of those, apart from Davos you can't do a day trip to them.

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

#83

Post by cycomanic »

xiii1408 wrote: post #24
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…

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…

It's important to remember you packets are in the network layer (probably when you send them even transport or application? I'm not so familiar with the higher layers in the OSI stack).

So you are still quite a bit removed from from the physical layers. Your packet will likely go through several electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical conversions, probably there will be some electric switches, plus multiplexers, all of which contain buffers. Then there is forward error correction in the physical layer which also requires buffers etc..

And you're obviously right that for many reasons the "straight path" might not be the path that is being taken, or even the fastest one.

Bottom line, estimating ping time from geographic distance is a very rough estimate. However, the longer the distance through an uninterrupted link (i.e. a submarine cable) the better your estimate, i.e. if you sit at in a google datacentre which is directly connected to their fibre backbone and do a ping to machine in a similar data centre on a different country you will get quite close numbers I imagine (I don't work for google). On the other hand if you sit somewhere in the mid-west at home and ping a server in e.g. NY or LA, not so much.

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

#84

Post by zikzak »

Youden wrote: post #78
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.

In addition to skiing, Switzerland's fantastic public transit gives you a huge array of options. My favourite day for guests is: - Train to Arth Goldau, optionally visit the zoo there - Train to Rigi Kulm (literally the top of a mountain, with some beautiful views) - Cable car or cogwheel railway to a ferry terminal on the Vierwaldstättersee - Ferry across the Vierwaldstättersee to Luzern - Train from Luzern back to…

I lived there in the early 90s and loved it. Coming from a small Canadian city, the idea that I could get somewhere good that wasn't rural and return home in a day, on a train, was just mind blowing. I also made 4x my Canadian wage as a cook. I was only there for 18 months but I seriously considered renewing my visa and staying. Ended up moving to Anaheim, CA. Big mistake. ;)

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

#85

Post by rsync »

linsomniac wrote: post #77
rsync wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But now I manage servers all over the world, and it's impossible to see them physically, even the ones that are hosted nearby." Did you know that we have "drive up" access ? If your account is in San Diego, you can just drive up to the datacenter and connect to our Ubiquiti LR AP. No Internet required. We had it deployed in Denver as well but we moved datacenters a few years ago and are in a tall high rise[1] with d…

I imagined when reading "tall high rise" that you were in DG&E. I'm not sure where you were at or if you are looking for something else, but we've long been in "Fortrust", now "Iron Mountain" which is north of downtown. In the past they've been very easy to work with, including at one point I used to have a dark fiber that ran from one of my cabinets to DG&E's meet me, where we used it to connect to Level-3. I know s…

Yeah - I don't love DG&E as a physical plant - I much prefer a very American-style one-story, big parking lot, urban sprawl kind of a datacenter ...

The issue is the he.net POP. We did use a fiber interconnect across Denver for several years to the coresite datacenter on (Denver) Pearl St. That was free because of a weird handshake deal we had from back in the day but when it stopped being free we really needed to go to DG&E to get 10gb links from Hurricane ...

I will also note that we partner with DenverOnline / Firstlink consulting which has their base inside DG&E so that also made good sense.

These are all business and personal relationships that go back to the mid-nineties and the Boulder bandwidth coop - we have a really great service and support infrastructure in Denver.

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

#87

Post by firethief »

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.

Surely it would be easier to use neutrinos?

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

#88

Post by sgtnoodle »

viraptor wrote: post #40
bob1029 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The edge is getting to be really important for high quality interactions, but there are some caveats. In systems in which there is common shared state between all participants (e.g. Fortnite), you fundamentally must have a form of centralized authority somewhere. In these cases, you do not gain very much by pushing things to the edge if most interactions require taking a round trip through the business state machine.…

> In systems in which there is common shared state between all participants (e.g. Fortnite), you fundamentally must have a form of centralized authority somewhere. I wonder if there's any big online game already which does match making preferring local servers. And I don't mean local as in "people registered in us-east region", but rather "there are 4 people ready to play in Chicago, spawn an instance there and conne…

Rather than matchmaking spatially, I reckon such a system would measure the round trip time between the players and the available server locations. That's something that typically happens manually when folk sort servers by latency. Very similar idea, but you could imagine two players being physically close to each other but electrically far away, due to things like being on different ISPs.

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

#89

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #57
e12e wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can work as a "smart cache" - like for example: https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/graphql-edge-caching-apollo/ I'm not entirely convinced this is a great idea (and apparently the example uses plain http between the graphql prox/cache and openlibrary.org - that might be considered a bug, I suppose: https://github.com/fly-apps/edge-apollo-cache/blob/master/sr... At any rate I'd assume whatever source you're proxying (e…

The Apollo thing is just an illustration of a pattern a bunch of our customers want to be able to do --- fine-grained API caching. I hope it's obvious than the HTTP connection to OpenLibrary isn't the point. :) But: while you can very easily use TLS to backhaul to an API, a more "modern" Fly.io way to solve this problem is with WireGuard gateways; it's trivial --- I'd argue, easier than configuring SSH certs --- to g…

I for one absolutely agree (disclosure a friend of the fly folk and an absolute fanboy).

One of the most interesting things about wireguard to me is cheap ubiquitous application neutral secure comms.

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

#90

Post by aidenn0 »

Kudos wrote: post #75
hinkley wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Donald, Danny is his uncle

Danny and Donald are unrelated.
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