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Comment by BenjiWiebe | Hacker News Reader

I love being able to convert from millilightseconds to miles, and vice versa. You can figure minimum latency for a given distance or maximum distance for a given latency.

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Is this a covert reference to the 500-mile e-mail?

Probably not. Knowing the speed-of-light round trip time to a network location gives you a bound on how much you can improve the performance of remote operations.

For example, I'm in Austin, querying a database hosted in Amazon's us-east-1 data center ("Northern Virginia"). Call it 1000 miles away, 2000 mile round trip.

    You have: 2000 miles
    You want: millilightseconds
            2000 miles = 10.736388 millilightseconds

If I have a query that's taking < 1ms, no optimization of how that query is executed by the database can possibly improve the overall performance.

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