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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?

#91

Post by vinay427 »

rjsw wrote: post #82
rsync wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried being North American? :)

In all seriousness, everything from Geneva to Sion to Chiasso seems relatively close to me in Zurich. The intercity public transit is neither cheap given the distances nor especially fast but they're still all reachable within 3-4 hours. It's difficult to do a ski day trip to the places mentioned, admittedly, but there are still plenty of spots closer to Zurich that are suitable for that.

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

#92

Post by bigiain »

rjsw wrote: post #82
rsync wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hah! Try being a ski bum from Sydney...

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

#93

Post by viraptor »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #88
viraptor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was thinking more in terms of dynamic scaling in really close locations - it's cheaper to check RTT to a specific POP rather than keep running full servers everywhere around the world.

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

#94

Post by bigiain »

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.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic example of the decision making pragmatism required of a "Senior Engineer" over a mid level or junior engineer...

;-)

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

#95

Post by bigiain »

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 used to regularly schlep hard drives in carry on luggage from Sydney to data centres in Singapore, London, San Francisco, and Dallas - just to spend half an hour in the cold aisle with a screwdriver replacing RAID pairs in production web servers to update more images/pdfs than made sense over the bandwidth we had available to us in the late 90s, and to bring home similarly "too big to download" archival backups.

Kept me comfortably in Gold Status with several airlines and the frequent flier miles allowed for a _lot_ of personal travel.

(While I miss that a lot, I'm super glad my business isn't reliant on international air travel being a thing these days...)

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

#96

Post by bigiain »

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.

Like the Alameda Weehawken Burrito Tunnel?

(Since somebody else has already mentioned the pinboardiness of these comments... https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_... )

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

#97

Post by rjsw »

vinay427 wrote: post #91
rjsw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you tried being North American? :) In all seriousness, everything from Geneva to Sion to Chiasso seems relatively close to me in Zurich. The intercity public transit is neither cheap given the distances nor especially fast but they're still all reachable within 3-4 hours. It's difficult to do a ski day trip to the places mentioned, admittedly, but there are still plenty of spots closer to Zurich that are suitabl…

> It's difficult to do a ski day trip to the places mentioned, admittedly, but there are still plenty of spots closer to Zurich that are suitable for that.

Sure, Flumserberg is close and there are good roads to Laax or Arosa.

I was just thinking that Grenoble, Innsbruck or even Munich have better access to skiing and probably have hosting providers, you can do day trips from all of them.

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

#100

Post by jholman »

danaliv wrote: post #29
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…

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).

Agreed. As we probably all know, the earth is smoother than a regulation billiard ball wrapped in 1000-grit sandpaper.
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