[HN Gopher] Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Where's the fastest place to put my server? How much does it
       matter?
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 116 points
       Date   : 2021-02-03 10:44 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (calpaterson.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (calpaterson.com)
        
       | joshxyz wrote:
       | Interesting problem really, for telegram bots I found Frankfurt
       | Germany to be near their servers, which gives me almost
       | instantaneous response.
       | 
       | For trading platforms it's fun monitoring latencies on websocket
       | heartbeats, sometimes i get lucky and discover some platform is
       | really nearby (e.g. 1ms to 3ms) which is very nice.
       | 
       | Still, nothing beats localhost as the fastest place on earth.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | mrkurt wrote:
       | Shameless 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 Miami than it is to hit Sao
       | Paulo or Santiago. The same goes for Africa.
       | 
       | And the "Asia Pacific" region is a monster. Most points of
       | presence there are _thousands_ of miles away from each other. So
       | we occasionally see people go from Tokyo -> LA instead of Tokyo
       | -> Hong Kong/Singapore.
        
         | toast0 wrote:
         | > It's frequently faster for people in Argentina to connect to
         | Miami than it is to hit Sao Paulo or Santiago.
         | 
         | Yeah, most networks in South America don't interconnect with
         | networks in other countries. They mostly connect in Miami,
         | because international connectivity is difficult to arrange, and
         | if you can only manage to connect to one other country, it
         | needs to be the US. Africa likely goes to Europe rather than
         | the US? But same thing, it's hard to connect, so first you have
         | to connect to where the content is. And there's not (currently)
         | enough network stability and capacity to just connect to your
         | neighbors and rely on them to get you to the US/EU either.
         | 
         | I don't know if it's current, but in Japan there used to be two
         | dominant networks, but they weren't both available at the same
         | PoP. You would need a Tokyo-A pop to get to one, and a Tokyo-B
         | pop to get to the other; and it was difficult to interconnect
         | those pops.
        
         | tudorizer wrote:
         | I'm intrigued. Do you own datacenters or piggybacking of some
         | existing infra?
        
           | mrkurt wrote:
           | We have dedicated hardware in a bunch of facilities, either
           | leased or colo.
        
         | subleq wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | danielheath wrote:
           | All the cacheable responses (including assets) benefit from
           | being close to the user.
        
           | mrkurt wrote:
           | App servers should have a fast access to data! Which either
           | means running caches alongside the app servers, or doing
           | clever things with databases.
           | 
           | We just released a preview Postgres + regional replicas. This
           | setup keeps the postgres leader in one region and lets people
           | add replicas in other regions they're interested in. It works
           | really well for typical full stack apps.
           | 
           | We've also found a surprising number of customers who want to
           | run in only one specific region. They don't spread apps out
           | geographically, they just have a concentrated population of
           | users in, say, Sydney. We're increasingly becoming "Heroku
           | for <region>".
        
           | kall wrote:
           | If it's feasable to shard data by user, you could put it in a
           | close shard, most users don't move continents that much. I
           | have never done this but as a latency nut I would like to try
           | it sometime. Seems like Cloudflare's Persistent Objects kind
           | of promises to do this automatically.
           | 
           | Then there are a lot of requests you can serve from read
           | replicas or caches that can be close.
        
             | mrkurt wrote:
             | Cockroach has a neat and almost transparent way of doing
             | this. If you key your tables by customer, it'll happily
             | move those chunks of data to the nodes that need them most
             | often.
             | 
             | We almost shipped cockroach but it's missing some Postgres
             | features that most full stack frameworks rely on.
        
           | e12e wrote:
           | It can work as a "smart cache" - like for example:
           | 
           | https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/graphql-edge-caching-apollo/
           | 
           | I'm not entirely convinced this is a great idea (and
           | apparently the example uses plain http between the graphql
           | prox/cache and openlibrary.org - that might be considered a
           | bug, I suppose: https://github.com/fly-apps/edge-apollo-
           | cache/blob/master/sr... At any rate I'd assume whatever
           | source you're proxying (eg your own openapi rest end points)
           | - you might want ssl - or connect the db/api to fly.io via
           | vpn a la: https://fly.io/blog/building-clusters-with-serf/
           | See also the linked: https://fly.io/blog/incoming-6pn-
           | private-networks/ ).
        
             | tptacek wrote:
             | The Apollo thing is just an illustration of a pattern a
             | bunch of our customers want to be able to do --- fine-
             | grained API caching. I hope it's obvious than the HTTP
             | connection to OpenLibrary isn't the point. :)
             | 
             | But: while you can very easily use TLS to backhaul to an
             | API, a more "modern" Fly.io way to solve this problem is
             | with WireGuard gateways; it's trivial --- I'd argue, easier
             | than configuring SSH certs --- to get a WireGuard link from
             | your cache app on Fly back to AWS, GCP, or wherever your
             | non-Fly legacy database lives.
             | 
             | I really think WireGuard is going to change a lot of the
             | ways we design systems like this.
        
           | toast0 wrote:
           | Assuming you can't get your database close to your users. It
           | depends on the data dependencies between your database calls.
           | If they're independent, and you do them in parallel, you can
           | do pretty well with a frontend near your user, parallel
           | queries to backends wherever.
           | 
           | If your queries have data dependencies, you'd get better
           | results with a front end near your users, and a middle tier
           | api near your database.
           | 
           | But, just TCP (or TLS) termination near your users and the
           | real frontend near your database can make a surprising amount
           | of difference.
           | 
           | On the other hand. There's a lot you can do to make sure
           | things are fast from limited locations. Keep an eye on data
           | size, make sure you're monitoring for and fixing slow
           | queries, optimize your images, etc. If your html takes
           | seconds to serve, it barely matters where you served it from.
        
       | airocker wrote:
       | Can 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?
        
         | macno wrote:
         | My guess, the author uses hetzner
        
           | calpaterson wrote:
           | Yep.
        
         | preinheimer wrote:
         | We (not the author of the article) use this provider in
         | Finland: https://creanova.org/
        
       | superzamp wrote:
       | Nice 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 probably less
       | effective).
        
         | NDizzle wrote:
         | There's always Varnish.
        
         | Nextgrid wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | CppCoder wrote:
       | Does anyone know or has experience in how a ,,Direct Connect"
       | line reduced the latency?
       | 
       | Instead of having your users go through the public internet, they
       | connect to some proxy which is closeby and sends the traffic
       | through the ,,privat" line.
        
       | ignoramous wrote:
       | Right 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...
        
         | bob1029 wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | This realization is why I really enjoy the renewed push for
         | server-side hosting technologies. Accept the fundamental
         | physics constraints, bring all the state under 1 roof, and
         | think differently about the footprint of a global-scale
         | application. AWS solved this problem by making their regions
         | more-or-less 100% standalone. The only major thing that really
         | spans all regions is account/session management, but consider
         | that there arent serious UX constraints around a login attempt
         | taking more than 150ms.
        
           | viraptor wrote:
           | > 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".
        
             | bob1029 wrote:
             | I am almost certain this already a metric used by
             | matchmaking in certain FPS games like Overwatch.
        
               | vermilingua wrote:
               | Ditto CS:GO, when I was playing with a friend in Sweden
               | (vs Australia), we'd all have to increase our max allowed
               | ping to the server, or the game would never find us a
               | party.
        
           | sudhirj wrote:
           | A lot of the tech now, see Cloudflare Durable Objects and
           | DynamoDB Global Tables, allows having _many_ centralised
           | authorities. Eventually one in every major city in the world.
        
       | fouric wrote:
       | As a not-currently-webdev, it seems to me like making a good
       | website, on a technical level, is closer to an engineering trade-
       | space (as opposed to "just do it better") than I had thought.
       | 
       | Splitting static content into smaller files allows for better
       | cache utilization, but increases page load times due to higher
       | latency when those items aren't cached. Bundling content reduces
       | roundtrip penalties (latency, various per-request processing
       | overheads) at the cost of greater bandwidth usage.
       | 
       | Wealthier users usually are latency-limited, as opposed to
       | bandwidth-limited. Mobile users and poorer users in wealthier
       | countries are usually limited on both. Users in poorer countries
       | have it even worse.
       | 
       | The only way that you can "win" appears to be by making your
       | content as static and as simple as possible.
        
         | cookie_monsta wrote:
         | > The only way that you can "win" appears to be by making your
         | content as static and as simple as possible.
         | 
         | Please.
        
       | jackjackk0 wrote:
       | On the related github repo:
       | 
       | "If you just want to see what I did, best to read the makefile
       | directly."
       | 
       | Sometimes I'm amazed by the power of a good makefile that allows
       | replicating a perhaps fairly complex set of inter-dependent
       | targets. I wish this approach was used more in academic research,
       | even though fitting data analysis and modelling within a standard
       | makefile can get tricky (e.g. some passages going through remote
       | cluster computing, some models involving large number of files
       | that would need to be listed as dependencies)
        
       | xiii1408 wrote:
       | Minor note---you can get much tighter theoretical minimum
       | latencies than the ones listed in your table.
       | 
       | 1. The table's mins divide straight line distance by the speed of
       | light. This gives you the time it takes for light to travel in a
       | straight line from, say, London to New York. However, your "real
       | latencies" are roundtrip ("ping") latencies. Thus, you need to
       | multiply all the theoretical latencies by two.
       | 
       | 2. Data does not travel through a fiber optic cable at the speed
       | of light. This is because light actually bends around the cable
       | when transmitted. These are called cosine losses, and mean the
       | light travels roughly 5/3 the actual cable distance. So, multiply
       | again by 5/3. (This is why HFT firms use microwave links for long
       | distances.)
       | 
       | If you multiply the theoretical maxes by 3.33, you'll see that
       | they're very close to the actual latencies you're observing. New
       | York -> London becomes 62.7 ms optimal, so you're only 13% slower
       | than the theoretical max.
       | 
       | Here on the west coast, I typically see within 10% of the
       | theoretical min for data going over the Seattle -> Japan
       | submarine cables.
        
         | xiii1408 wrote:
         | Also a couple of things to note:
         | 
         | 1. Submarine cables can't go in a straight line, since they've
         | got to, you know, go down to the bottom of the ocean. (Which,
         | you may have heard, is quite deep.) Also, a cable with a length
         | of several thousand miles tends to have some slack.
         | 
         | 2. Your packets may take a very curvy route from one city to
         | another, even when they're not geographically that distant.
         | This may be because your ISP is bad (and has poor/limited
         | routes), geographic or geopolitical concerns, or just because
         | of the way the Internet infrastructure is built. On the US's
         | west coast, I often experience latencies 60%+ slower than the
         | theoretical minimum when accessing servers in the central or
         | eastern US. (e.g. SF -> Des Moines, IA at 70ms).
        
           | cycomanic wrote:
           | It's important to remember you packets are in the network
           | layer (probably when you send them even transport or
           | application? I'm not so familiar with the higher layers in
           | the OSI stack).
           | 
           | So you are still quite a bit removed from from the physical
           | layers. Your packet will likely go through several
           | electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical conversions,
           | probably there will be some electric switches, plus
           | multiplexers, all of which contain buffers. Then there is
           | forward error correction in the physical layer which also
           | requires buffers etc..
           | 
           | And you're obviously right that for many reasons the
           | "straight path" might not be the path that is being taken, or
           | even the fastest one.
           | 
           | Bottom line, estimating ping time from geographic distance is
           | a very rough estimate. However, the longer the distance
           | through an uninterrupted link (i.e. a submarine cable) the
           | better your estimate, i.e. if you sit at in a google
           | datacentre which is directly connected to their fibre
           | backbone and do a ping to machine in a similar data centre on
           | a different country you will get quite close numbers I
           | imagine (I don't work for google). On the other hand if you
           | sit somewhere in the mid-west at home and ping a server in
           | e.g. NY or LA, not so much.
        
           | danaliv wrote:
           | For point 1, is the depth of the ocean significant compared
           | to the distances traversed? My back-of-the-envelope math
           | suggests it's less than half a percent for a cable from New
           | York to England. (6 miles down + 6 miles up, divided by rough
           | great circle distance of 2600 nautical miles.)
           | 
           | I would think a bigger factor would be that the cables (IIRC)
           | don't go in straight lines (which you did allude to).
        
             | sandworm101 wrote:
             | Correct. The ocean bottom is relatively flat once away from
             | the continents. Also, the submarine cable actually has a
             | very slight advantage over a surface cable as at several
             | thousand feet below it is following a slightly smaller
             | radius curve. I'm waiting for the HFT firm to bore a
             | literally strait hole between London and New York. Then we
             | know that HFT has gone too far.
        
               | chokeartist wrote:
               | > I'm waiting for the HFT firm to bore a literally strait
               | hole between London and New York. Then we know that HFT
               | has gone too far.
               | 
               | No need. They have Starlink now (or soon).
        
               | foota wrote:
               | Think of the shipping opportunities!
        
           | pbhjpbhj wrote:
           | Debugging high ping at home once mtr (or similar, I think it
           | was a graphical tool) showed the first 5 or 6 hops all in the
           | ISPs network and taking about  2/3  of the time; going from
           | UK to USA and then leaving their network in Amsterdam IIRC
           | only to terminate at another data-center in UK. Pretty crazy.
           | 
           | Ha, it only just struck me that could have been an NSA-type
           | routing issue!?!
        
             | hinkley wrote:
             | That reminds me of the bug in Google Maps where a route
             | from southern Sweden to Norway suggested driving through
             | the Chunnel and taking a car ferry across from Scotland.
        
             | WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
             | The internet is supposed to be self-healing but the ISP
             | routes are sometimes hella-dumb.
             | 
             | More than once I have seen a traceroute that takes you from
             | Miami, down to Argentina and then back up to Cali.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | See this other comment also:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26028498
         | 
         | Round trip vs one-way
        
         | calpaterson wrote:
         | Well spotted! I have corrected issue #1 you noticed, a very
         | silly mistake, thank you!
         | 
         | #2 is great background! But these cosine losses are I suppose
         | not a theoretical limit but a limitation of fibre optics so I
         | won't include that (but I will link to your comment!).
        
         | singhrac wrote:
         | Just as significant for HFT is that speed of light through air
         | is significantly higher (3/2) than speed of light through
         | glass.
        
         | ksec wrote:
         | >so you're only 13% slower than the theoretical max.
         | 
         | Yes. Not to mention those Fibre aren't exactly a straight line.
         | There is extra distance for layering the fibre route. 13% is
         | very close to practical maximum.
         | 
         | That is why I asked [1] if we have Hollow Core Cable [2] soon
         | where we get close to Real speed of light.
         | 
         | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26026002
         | 
         | [2] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/fiber-
         | optics/article/1417001...
        
           | xiii1408 wrote:
           | That sounds awesome. I would love to see lower latencies.
           | 
           | Do you know if anyone's considering these for consumer
           | Internet?
        
             | cycomanic wrote:
             | At the moment they are nowhere close to being ready for
             | wide deployment or large scale commercial drawing (try to
             | find some videos of modern fibre drawing the speed is
             | absolutely insane).
             | 
             | Obviously the HFT crowd are very interested in these, but
             | they are willing to pay the premiums. Also the next area is
             | probably datacentres where latency is very important as
             | well, and these fibres already provide similar losses to
             | multi-mode fibres at ~900 nm wavelengths.
        
             | toast0 wrote:
             | Assuming these cables cost more, or require equipment that
             | costs more, I wouldn't expect this on last mile
             | connections. ISPs simply don't care that much. DSL
             | providers typically run connections with settings that add
             | 15+ms of round trip. My DSL provider runs PPPoE for fiber
             | connections where fiber is available, etc. When I was on
             | AT&T fiber, it was still about 3-5 ms round trip to the
             | first hop. It's been a while since I've experienced cable
             | to know how they mess it up.
             | 
             | If there's significant deployment of the cable in long
             | distance networks, eventually that should trickle down to
             | users. It would probably happen faster if there were
             | competitive local networks, but regardless, a significant
             | drop in latency across a country or ocean can be big enough
             | to justify some expense.
        
         | cycomanic wrote:
         | What do you mean by cosine losses? I have done research in
         | fibre optics for more than a decade and never heard that term.
         | Also I have no idea what you mean by light bends around the
         | fibre. A simple explanation of light propagation in multi-mode
         | fibres can use geometric optics to explain how light propagates
         | along the fibre by reflecting of the interface between core and
         | cladding, however this simple picture does not apply to single-
         | mode fibre (which all long distance connections are) and also
         | does not easily explain the group velocities in fibre.
         | 
         | The reason that light travels slower in fibre is because the
         | refractive index of slica is about 1.5 while it is 1 in glass
         | (in reality it's a bit more complicated, it's the group index
         | that counts, which is also approx. 1.5 however).
        
       | preinheimer wrote:
       | If you're looking for more detailed ping data this is his source:
       | https://wondernetwork.com/pings
       | 
       | (which didn't seem to be worth linking to)
        
         | calpaterson wrote:
         | Yes! I'm just going to add a link right this minute!
        
       | antidocker wrote:
       | Interesting read. Did you measure your application latency?
       | 
       | It's wrong to think that CA to London is slowest. It may if you
       | view things physically but fast POPs make it fastest route
       | sometimes.
        
       | bullen wrote:
       | I make MMOs, and there are only two "large" cloud providers that
       | have machines in central US: Google and IONOS.
        
         | jaywalk wrote:
         | Azure has two central US locations: one in Iowa and one in
         | Texas. They are probably larger than GCP and IONOS put
         | together.
        
       | rsync wrote:
       | Many 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.
        
         | Hallucinaut wrote:
         | This is one of those comments that's difficult to interpret the
         | meaning of... until you read the commenter's name.
         | 
         | (Love your work)
        
         | Analemma_ wrote:
         | This might set the record as the Pinboard-iest post that didn't
         | actually come from Pinboard.
        
         | Johnny555 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | hinkley wrote:
           | I annoyed my family by chiming in during The Martian about
           | Donald Glover freezing his ass off in the server room:
           | 
           | He doesn't have to be cold! If he moved over one aisle he'd
           | be nice and toasty!
           | 
           | Last time I was having to go into a server room, hot and cold
           | aisles were still a new thing, so it was just cold
           | everywhere.
        
             | Kudos wrote:
             | Donald, Danny is his uncle
        
               | hinkley wrote:
               | Goddamnit. I had it right and outsmarted myself.
        
           | rsync wrote:
           | "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 ...
        
             | linsomniac wrote:
             | I imagined when reading "tall high rise" that you were in
             | DG&E. I'm not sure where you were at or if you are looking
             | for something else, but we've long been in "Fortrust", now
             | "Iron Mountain" which is north of downtown. In the past
             | they've been very easy to work with, including at one point
             | I used to have a dark fiber that ran from one of my
             | cabinets to DG&E's meet me, where we used it to connect to
             | Level-3. I know some of their customers have antennas on
             | the outside of the building, though I don't believe I'm
             | supposed to know why so I won't go into details. :-) They
             | have plenty of parking, might be worth investigating.
             | 
             | DG&E is a weird and wonderful building. Used to have a
             | client that had a suite in there. For those unaware, it is
             | an old, old building, right next to the building that
             | houses the Denver main telco switch. It was built over a
             | hundred years ago, and has been Denver's largest (? maybe
             | that info is out of date) meet-me room for Internet
             | providers. Being such an old building, you can imagine it
             | has all sorts of problems retrofitting modern requirements
             | for cabling and power generation/backup.
        
             | Arelius wrote:
             | Any capacity to plug in an good old-fashioned Ethernet
             | cable?
        
               | rsync wrote:
               | Well, yes and no ...
               | 
               | Of course we have switches in our racks and of course we
               | could find a way to plug you in ...
               | 
               | However, there would be a _lot_ of administrative
               | overhead just to get you inside the datacenter in
               | question, not to mention how _we_ would clear you and
               | your equipment, etc.
               | 
               | We regularly accept bare SATA drives as ingress and we
               | support that process in reverse - most likely we would
               | steer you towards that route ...
        
         | switch007 wrote:
         | I've nothing against Switzerland (it's nice) but you're the
         | first person I've ever come across to suggest Zurich (or
         | anywhere in Switzerland) as the coolest and most interesting
         | place in Europe!
         | 
         | I'm genuinely interested to hear more.
        
           | pbhjpbhj wrote:
           | Presumably, it's 'of the list of places with a data-center
           | meeting the specs we require' which, I imagine, limits the
           | range of options somewhat.
        
             | rsync wrote:
             | No, it really is mostly about skiing (see above).
             | 
             | Amsterdam, Frankfurt and (perhaps surprisingly) Marseilles
             | are the places to go if you want to optimize for routing.
             | 
             | Equinix has datacenters, with he.net POP, in all three
             | places. You could do a lot worse than standardizing,
             | globally, on EQX datacenters and he.net connectivity ...
        
           | Youden wrote:
           | In addition to skiing, Switzerland's fantastic public transit
           | gives you a huge array of options. My favourite day for
           | guests is:
           | 
           | - Train to Arth Goldau, optionally visit the zoo there
           | 
           | - Train to Rigi Kulm (literally the top of a mountain, with
           | some beautiful views)
           | 
           | - Cable car or cogwheel railway to a ferry terminal on the
           | Vierwaldstattersee
           | 
           | - Ferry across the Vierwaldstattersee to Luzern
           | 
           | - Train from Luzern back to Zurich HB
           | 
           | If you have a resident buy you a day pass in advance, all of
           | this costs 44 CHF ($44).
           | 
           | There's really a lot to do though. You can do a day trip to
           | pretty much anywhere in Switzerland. I've done it to Geneva a
           | couple of times, also to towns out in the boonies.
        
           | rsync wrote:
           | Yes, Zurich is pretty sleepy, but you need to factor in
           | driving distances to skiing ...
           | 
           | Zurich is very quick and convenient to any of Chamonix
           | (straight west) Davos/St.Moritz (south), Cervina/Zermatt
           | (southwest) or Sudtirol (southeast).
        
             | rjsw wrote:
             | I wouldn't call Zurich particularly close to any of those,
             | apart from Davos you can't do a day trip to them.
        
             | switch007 wrote:
             | Ah now it makes sense. I can definitely see the appeal for
             | a skier :)
        
       | JoeAltmaier wrote:
       | Not Eugene OR. That's where my startup put their servers for a
       | conference/collaboration tool. I remember getting a complaint
       | from a customer in Jordan, trying to conference with a customer
       | in India. They had something like 1sec latency, communicating
       | through Eugene and back. Twice across the planet.
        
       | gruez wrote:
       | >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.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | The table updated with that fix.
         | 
         | https://jsfiddle.net/32e0qkxs/
        
         | calpaterson wrote:
         | Author here, you are absolutely right and I will correct that!
        
       | krzrak wrote:
       | 1 mb (1 milibit) HTML is not that "fat"...
        
         | bdcravens wrote:
         | By today's standards, in a nation rich in high speed
         | connections, perhaps.
        
           | stjo wrote:
           | I think you missed the (a bit pedantic) joke about units
        
           | timbit42 wrote:
           | 1 MB = 1 megabyte
           | 
           | 1 Mb = 1 megabit
           | 
           | 1 mB = 1 millibyte
           | 
           | 1 mb = 1 millibit
        
             | sagolikasoppor wrote:
             | In Europe a megabit is usually written mbit
        
             | detaro wrote:
             | 1 mB = 1 millibucket
        
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