Hacker News Reader

Comment by preinheimer | Hacker News Reader

Global Ping Data - https://wondernetwork.com/pings

We've got servers in 200+ cities around the world, and ask them to ping each other every hour. Currently it takes our servers in Tokyo and London about 226ms to ping each other.

We've got some downloadable datasets here if you want to play with them: https://wonderproxy.com/blog/a-day-in-the-life-of-the-intern...

View on HN

The fundamental physical limit to latency caused by the speed of light is gleefully ignored by many web "application" architects. Apps that feel super snappy when hosted in the same region run like molasses from places like Australia. Unless the back-end is deployed in every major region, a significant fraction of your userbase will always think of your app as sluggish, irrespective of how much optimisation work goes into it.

Some random example:

Azure Application Insights can be deployed to any Azure region, making it feel noticeably snappier than most cloud hosted competitors such as New Relic or logz.io.

ESRI ArcGIS has a cloud version that is "quick and easy" to use compare to the hosted version... and is terribly slow for anyone outside of the US.

Our timesheet app is hosted in the US and is barely useable. Our managers complain that engineers "don't like timesheets". Look... we don't mind timesheets, but having to... wait... seconds... for.... each... click... is just torture, especially at 4:55pm on a Friday afternoon.

As a developer in Australia, we are painfully aware of this haha. Plenty of web services that aren’t deployed here feel painfully slow due to the latency costs — regardless of having decent bandwidth today.

Because our product is global, our backends are replicated worldwide too. Otherwise we’d be forcing the pain we go through daily on our users too

Gamers in Australia as well (when not using local game servers). South Africa idem (idem).

Even if you fix where the backend is & use something like Edge workers around the world, you still run into the issue of where the database is hosted. Making all the work useless. Any useful endpoint is going to change some state like the timesheet app.

Your point is completely valid but physically there still is some room to improve. Hollow core fibers for instance allow light to move one third faster.

With 40 Mm circumference and 300 Mm/s light speed in vacuum you have as a physical limit latency below 70 ms from opposite places in the world.

> Hollow core fibers for instance allow light to move one third faster.

Could you expand on this? The speed of light is constant, no?

In vacuum. In glass it’s significantly lower. Air core fibre brings it back up to about 99% or thereabouts…

I've used your ping data before, it was useful to know where to place my servers, and how nice of you to publish a dump as well! If I can wish for mor data: a min-median-max client latencies for all those servers would be swell, but I can see that you might not want to publish the results of that maybe on per month basis? Just a couple of thousand packets every hour should be enough: tcpdump -w stats.pcap -c5000 "tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) != 0"

I'm curious if you have a theory or explanation as to why some pings appear to be asymmetric. For example for the following cities, it seems West->East is often faster than East->West:

                Chicago         London         New York
  Chicago       —               105.73ms       21.273ms
  London        108.227ms       —              72.925ms
  New York      21.598ms        73.282ms       —

Seems like those numbers are likely all within a margin of error. If you hover over the times in the table, it also gives you min and max values, which are often +/- 2ms or so.

*Adds to mental list of cool resources that exist on the internet*

Looking at the map with the blue dots, a cool rainy-day project would be to show the pings and pongs flying back and forth :3

Reply on news.ycombinator.com