Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

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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).

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…

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.

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