I make MMOs, and there are only two "large" cloud providers that have machines in central US: Google and IONOS.
Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
31–40 of 124 posts
Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
#32Many 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.
"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 difficult access to ground level or roof for antennae ...
[1] The "Gas and Electric" building which is the big carrier hotel in Denver ...
Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
#33Nice article. > Caches work great for CSS files, images and javascript - stuff that doesn't chance for each user. It doesn't work as well for the responses to API calls, for which the responses are different for each user, and sometimes, each time Regarding this, there seems to be some people addressing the issue now (I have fly.io in mind, and maybe Vercel but I believe the latter use lambdas behind the hood so prob…
Ultimately there has to be a source of truth somewhere, and geographically scaling a DB is difficult (CAP theorem and all that). Running your code at the edge doesn't help much if it still has to talk to a database far away to actually produce a response.
Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
#34Can you elaborate more about the server in Finland? How does it work? The ones I have seen are super expensive and the only thing they provide over putting server at home is the network quality. Any ideas where we can get a inexpensive data center that can on/off the system and give good network?
We (not the author of the article) use this provider in Finland: https://creanova.org/
Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
#35Shameless plug: https://fly.io We built Fly _specifically_ so you can run servers close to your users. We do a lot for you on the network side, too, like terminate TLS in all our regions. One thing to note, though, is that latencies between cities are surprisingly different than their theoretical max. We have apps on Fly with lots of South American users. It's frequently faster for people in Argentina to connect to M…
The applications I work on do several database calls for single user HTTP request. Shouldn't the application server be as close as possible to the database, rather than to the user? I struggle to think of an example where your model is useful, unless your application has no database.
Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
#36>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.
Author here, you are absolutely right and I will correct that!
Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
#37Can you elaborate more about the server in Finland? How does it work? The ones I have seen are super expensive and the only thing they provide over putting server at home is the network quality. Any ideas where we can get a inexpensive data center that can on/off the system and give good network?
My guess, the author uses hetzner
Yep.
Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
#38Shameless plug: https://fly.io We built Fly _specifically_ so you can run servers close to your users. We do a lot for you on the network side, too, like terminate TLS in all our regions. One thing to note, though, is that latencies between cities are surprisingly different than their theoretical max. We have apps on Fly with lots of South American users. It's frequently faster for people in Argentina to connect to M…
The applications I work on do several database calls for single user HTTP request. Shouldn't the application server be as close as possible to the database, rather than to the user? I struggle to think of an example where your model is useful, unless your application has no database.
All the cacheable responses (including assets) benefit from being close to the user.
Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"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…
Any capacity to plug in an good old-fashioned Ethernet cable?
Re: Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it matter?
#40Right 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.…
> 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 connect them".