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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?

#21

Post by sudhirj »

bob1029 wrote: post #17
ignoramous wrote: post #10

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...

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.…

A lot of the tech now, see Cloudflare Durable Objects and DynamoDB Global Tables, allows having many centralised authorities. Eventually one in every major city in the world.

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

#22

Post by ksec »

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…

>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/article/1417001...

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

#23

Post by tyingq »

gruez wrote: post #13

>Here's a table of latencies from London to other world cities with more than 5 million people, comparing against the theoretical maximum speed, the speed of light: This is a flawed comparison because it looks like he's comparing ping latency (round trip time) with speed of light (one trip), so the "Slowdown factor" columns is off by a factor of two.

The table updated with that fix.

https://jsfiddle.net/32e0qkxs/

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

#24

Post by xiii1408 »

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 ISP is bad (and has poor/limited routes), geographic or geopolitical concerns, or just because of the way the Internet infrastructure is built. On the US's west coast, I often experience latencies 60%+ slower than the theoretical minimum when accessing servers in the central or eastern US. (e.g. SF -> Des Moines, IA at 70ms).

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

#25

Post by tyingq »

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…

See this other comment also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26028498

Round trip vs one-way

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

#26

Post by Johnny555 »

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.

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

#27

Post by xiii1408 »

ksec wrote: post #22
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…

>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?

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

#29

Post by danaliv »

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…

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).

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