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

calpaterson.com

111–120 of 124 posts

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

#111
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_... )

Wait what?

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

#112
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.

We're not too far off – HFT is already digging tunnels [0] and building microwave relay paths [1].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/opinion/krugman-three-exp...

[1] https://www.amsterdamtrader.com/2014/09/hft-in-my-backyard.h...

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

#113
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 might set the record as the Pinboard-iest post that didn't actually come from Pinboard.

Pinboard, the bookmarking system? Did you mean Pinterest?

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thought quantum entanglement solved the HFT use case

Quantum entanglement does not allow FTL communications (which would break causality).

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

#115
Most CDN providers set TCP/IP initial congestion window to boost performance. TCP/IP initial congestion window is how fast TCP/IP first sends the data to the client. TCP/IP has slow start algorithm normally that slowly starts sending data and then its goes faster and faster. I would say most CDN providers have tuned the TCP init congestion window Linux performance setting properly that speeds up the initial sending speed.

One could compare CDN and HTTP server with setting TCP initial window or without.

Linux command to change initcwnd ``sudo ip route change default via 192.168.1.1 dev eth0 proto static initcwnd 10```

For more information about initcwnd see: * https://blog.imaginea.com/look-at-tcp-initcwnd-cdns/ * https://tma.ifip.org/2018/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/06... * https://www.cdnplanet.com/blog/tune-tcp-initcwnd-for-optimum...

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

#116

Right now, due to vast CDN footprints, PoPs would be the fastest place to run a "web server": S3+Cloudfront / Lambda at Edge, Cloudflare Workers, StackPath EdgeEngine etc Soon the fastest place is going to be the 5G Edge with products like vapor.io Kinetic Edge Colo, AWS Wavelength, Google Anthos for Telecommunications already making a push for it. Ex: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/anthos-for-telec...

I wonder when Starlink is out of beta whether they have any plans to have some sort of CDN inside of their satellites. That could result in having some seriously low latency for content on the edge even over a satellite connection.

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

#118
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_... )

This is fiction? Right? Please tell me there is no actual tunnel that transports burritos from west to east coast of the United States.

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

#119
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for that reply, loved the geeky details. I'm also an old Boulder co-op user here, I was heavily involved in the Fort Collins version for quite a while, and had various connections including UUCP dialup, SLIP, and T1s to the Boulder co-op.

I hadn't realized that rsync.net had drive up service until this thread. Very cool service, even if we don't have it in Denver anymore.

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

#120
post #47
post #31

I make MMOs, and there are only two "large" cloud providers that have machines in central US: Google and IONOS.

Azure has two central US locations: one in Iowa and one in Texas. They are probably larger than GCP and IONOS put together.

Well Azure is so bad, they still can swap hardware for your instances on the fly.
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