Live data from Hacker News

AWS data center latencies, visualized

benjdd.com

101–110 of 223 posts

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This page is such a well executed interactive map. Really enjoyed it Is the math-planation of your random fact basically ( thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Hikikomori for correcting the lightspeed in fibre medium from 3e5 to 2e5 ! ) - lightspeed is 2e5 km/s ~ 2e2 km/ms, so/ - length (km) / 200 (km)/ms ~ K length (km) / 200 (km)/ms, so - latency (ms) ~ K' length (km) Where K is approximately 1.3 (K' is 1…

It is possible I was measuring latency in a single direction, rather than round-trip-time. My memory is a little hazy now.

No I think you had it right. I was off on the speed. Anyway, it could have matched accounting K for other factors heh :)

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh shit! Thanks. Good point. That actually makes it more plausible, as K is smaller.

1/2 c in circuit boards (FR-4), 1/3 c in cables, two useful numbers to remember.

Depends on what kind of cable? As twisted pair network cable is at 2/3.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#104
post #5

Interesting. If you click on one of the blue circles representing a data center, it shows latencies to the other data centers. This took me a second to figure out — maybe consider adding a note along the lines of “click to select a data center” on the site?

Author here. This is great feedback, thanks.

I appreciate the effort to collect the data, but I think the rotating globe is an idea that looks cool, but makes the visualization harder to use. If I click on us-east-1, there's a 229ms line to...somewhere that I can't see. Meanwhile, I can't see the latency between us-east-1 and us-east-2.

Perhaps if you selected a datacenter, and it switched to a 2-d projection with that datacenter at the center of the map, it would be better?

Or perhaps augment the visualization with a table?

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#106
post #65

Obviously the biggest contribution to latency is distance. But there's also some close-ish regions with poor latency because there's not fiber running directly between them (for example, over the poles) Are there an examples of regions which dramatically violate the triangle equality? (That is, where the A--C latency is much worse than the best A--B + B--C latencies)? Just as a curiosity, could you use that idea to "…

I can't speak for AWS specifically, but in my PhD thesis [1] I found a bunch of such examples by using RIPE Atlas probes. Essentially looking for pairs of probes where the RTT between probe A and probe C is larger than probe A-B + B-C.

Now there are some issues with this methodology (all common issues with ICMP/RTT measurements + traffic was not really routed through the "relay" probe), but such pairs do exist.

[1] https://theses.hal.science/tel-03666771/document (see page 84 for an example; if you can read French :-))

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#108

Us-east-1 is hard to beat. Close to the network centrality of the of the internet, low latency to both the west coast and Europe.

> Close to the network centrality of the of the internet Most of the Internet is fractured even though technically publically routable. E.g., for someone living in China the US isn't anywhere near "network centrality". If an internet centrality exists, it is somewhere in France or the Netherlands - usually cross-continent traffic goes through there, they have dedicated interchanges for that.

I did some research about this a while back: https://utdemir.com/posts/choosing-cloud-regions.html#:~:tex...

You are right, the best region that optimises median latency against all internet users over the world is `us-west-3`, which is Paris - I believe. Likely because it has much better latency towards Asia where the majority of internet users are.

I also investigated which two regions to choose for a multi-region setup, which ends up being London and Japan.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#109
It would be really cool if it didn't just show the ping, but how much worse it is compared to the theoretical optimum (speed of light in fiber optic medium, which I believe is about 30% slower than c).

I raise this because I've been in multiple system architecture meetings where people were complaining about latency between data centers, only to later realize that it was pretty close to what is theoretically possible in the first place.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a quick workaround, you can set a CSS filter on the whole page: Either use dev tools to put a rule `filter: hue-rotate(60deg);` on the `body` element, or simply run `javascript:void(document.body.style.filter='hue-rotate(60deg)')` from the url bar.

Nice hack, thank you! :-)

In case you are not aware, you can put this sort of thing in a bookmark on the bookmark bar (both FF and Chrom{e|ium}, I assume other browsers too) for easy access. If you don't have the bookmark bar visible hit [ctrl][shift][B] to flip it on (and the same to flip it back off later if you don't want to keep it).
Post reply on HN