I think you may have misread my comment. The other replies are accepting multi-millisecond latencies as a given, and think that Google's network must be slower

I think you may have misread my comment. The other replies are accepting multi-millisecond latencies as a given, and think that Google's network must be slower than even a basic copper-wired LAN because it's bigger. My response is something like "just because the network's bigger doesn't mean it's slower". >> You will never be able to replicate the performance of Google's network >> by buying some rackmounted servers from Dell and plumbing them together >> with Cisco switches. > > and yet, somehow we do quite a bit better (admittedly they are very, > very expensive switches) With respect, if you're in the trading business, your network almost certainly contains custom hardware. I bet it looks a lot closer to Google's than it does to the guy plugging cat5e into a Dell.