Live data from Hacker News

AWS data center latencies, visualized

benjdd.com

71–80 of 223 posts

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#71
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 "…

> 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)?

I don't think this would happen at a significant scale, due to how routing works. If taking the "detour" through B is how the ICMP packets get there cheapest, that's the path they will go.

If anything, we could look at where A–C is nearly equal to A–B + B–C and find where such a thing has happened. I suppose it could happen for reasons other than lack of fiber: financially better peering agreements, etc?

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#72

Random fact: I did some planning around this for a client a while ago. While measuring the AWS latencies I found I could get approximate latencies (within 10%) by measuring the rough undersea cable length (km) and dividing by 150. While not overly surprising, it was very consistent. Edit: I think it was actually 155

There's a surprising amount of real-world modelling that can be done to satisfactory precision with just multiplication and addition.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#73

I have red-green color blindness, which makes it hard/impossible for me to distinguish between the 200ms lines. This affects about 8% of male population btw, maybe you can add a color-blind mode, very nice visualization otherwise!

There are some chrome extensions for colorblind. It might be helpful to you. Please check it out.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#74

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.

Although in my experience all the traffic from East Asia and Oceania (Australia, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc) to Europe goes through the US. So network-wise, the US is more central.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#75
post #66
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 "…

You can just look at the map of fiber optic cables around the world: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ It's highly unlikely there are any non-disclosed undersea ones since they cost rather a lot to lay down.

> It's highly unlikely there are any ..

Going back decades when a billion US was real money the original NSA (No Such Agency) that essentially no one had ever heard of, including most of the US houses and much of the defence committees that had clearance but not that clearance, had a 4 Billion+ budget for "off-book" satellites.

Black cables are a damn sight cheaper than black satellites.

Re: AWS data center latencies, visualized

#80

I have red-green color blindness, which makes it hard/impossible for me to distinguish between the 200ms lines. This affects about 8% of male population btw, maybe you can add a color-blind mode, very nice visualization otherwise!

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.
Post reply on HN