3 ms·
What's weird is that the distance from SF to Paris is 9000 Km, which is 30 light-ms. So the theoretical minimal latency would be 30ms. How comes we're 5 times
by Ecco 9y ago
What's weird is that the distance from SF to Paris is 9000 Km, which is 30 light-ms. So the theoretical minimal latency would be 30ms.
How comes we're 5 times above that ?
Is the latency introduced by routers ? If yes, then that quite doesn't make sense : I doubt there is any in the middle of the Atlantic.
Is the routing that inefficient that the data travels 50000 km ?
- pfg 9y agoWhat people typically mean when they say speed of light is the speed in vacuum. For optical fibers, you can reduce that number by about 30%. It's also unlikely that there is a straight line from A to B, and each network hop will introduce additional latency - there are > 10 hops from my home connection to Scaleway, and that's with both ends located in Europe.
- Ecco 9y agoGood points. The 30% increase and the not-straight-distance could explain a 50% slowdown. But here we have a 500% difference. Also the number of hops probably isn't really relevant : there probably isn't any router in the middle of the Atlantic, and just like you said there is already a bunch of router on an European-only route whose latency would most likely be below 10ms.
- pfg 9y agoIt's not really a question of where the hops are located. There'll be a couple of them in Europe and a couple in NA. Each will introduce a bit of latency. The numbers from the article are also round-trip times (that's what you get with the ping command), so you'd have to double whatever number you come up with from the one-way distance alone.
- effie 9y ago> The numbers from the article are also round-trip times (that's what you get with the ping command), so you'd have to double whatever number you come up with from the one-way distance alone. Indeed, the theoretical minimum ping time for 9000km is 60ms.