3 ms·

Ask HN: How is Google's ping time so good?

13 points by msravi 12y ago

I was surprised at how much better ping times to google.com are compared to other high traffic sites (facebook, twitter, yahoo, etc.) from Bangalore, India. round-trip min/avg/max/stddev google.com: 8.990/10.943/16.533/1.501 ms, yahoo.com: 262.387/331.857/465.871/47.595 ms, facebook.com: 239.865/299.477/420.529/37.281 ms, twitter.com: 298.604/349.843/474.227/38.724 ms I did a traceroute to see what's happening. The path to google seems to be: Bangalore(India) --> Chennai(India) --> Mumbai(India) --> Mountain View(US) --> Atlanta(US) --> New York(US) And the path to facebook seems to be: Bangalore(India) --> Mumbai(India) --> Marseille(France) --> Paris(France) --> Hong Kong --> New York(US) --> Tokyo(Japan) --> Milpitas(US) --> Singapore --> Ashburn(US) --> Dulles(US) --> Forest City(US) --> Dublin(Ireland) --> Forest City(US) What's with the world tour for facebook? Is it that google has a dedicated link that allows it to establish a direct route and the others don't? What do the routes from other countries to google/facebook look like?

msravi 12y ago
Traceroute results: $ traceroute google.com traceroute: Warning: google.com has multiple addresses; using 74.125.236.160 traceroute to google.com (74.125.236.160), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1. 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 1.533 ms 1.153 ms 1.013 ms -- 2. 10.255.0.1 (10.255.0.1) 1.717 ms 2.914 ms 1.784 ms -- 3. 83.20-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.20.10) 2.449 ms 2.801 ms 2.746 ms -- 4. 83.26-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.26.2) 3.813 ms 4.653 ms 5.501 ms -- 5. 83.26-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.26.1) 2.532 ms 2.613 ms 1.976 ms -- 6. 83.20-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.20.70) 2.301 ms 2.880 ms 1.645 ms -- 7. 83.20-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.20.69) 2.098 ms 2.694 ms 2.213 ms -- 8. 115.112.9.29.static-bangalore.vsnl.net.in (115.112.9.29) 3.568 ms 5.841 ms 4.543 ms -- 9. 172.31.19.245 (172.31.19.245) 9.177 ms 23.144 ms 10.812 ms -- 10. * * * -- 11. 115.114.142.137.static-chennai.vsnl.net.in (115.114.142.137) 11.077 ms 9.071 ms 31.422 ms -- 12. 121.240.1.50 (121.240.1.50) 10.181 ms 10.293 ms 11.180 ms -- 13. 72.14.233.204 (72.14.233.204) 23.763 ms 11.805 ms 9.806 ms -- 14. 209.85.240.145 (209.85.240.145) 11.000 ms 10.502 ms 10.207 ms -- 15. maa03s16-in-f0.1e100.net (74.125.236.160) 10.094 ms 12.126 ms 9.764 ms $ traceroute facebook.com traceroute to facebook.com (173.252.120.6), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1. 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 3.454 ms 0.944 ms 0.979 ms -- 2. 10.255.0.1 (10.255.0.1) 1.968 ms 2.600 ms 1.629 ms -- 3. 83.20-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.20.10) 2.190 ms 1.998 ms 2.361 ms -- 4. 83.26-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.26.2) 7.346 ms 5.842 ms 19.984 ms -- 5. 83.26-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.26.1) 4.139 ms 2.908 ms 2.478 ms -- 6. 83.20-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.20.70) 1.722 ms 1.625 ms 1.871 ms -- 7. 83.20-broadband.acttv.in (202.83.20.69) 3.061 ms 3.283 ms 2.019 ms -- 8. 115.112.9.29.static-bangalore.vsnl.net.in (115.112.9.29) 15.204 ms 9.908 ms 6.517 ms -- 9. 172.29.250.33 (172.29.250.33) 21.912 ms 21.407 ms * -- 10. 115.114.85.210 (115.114.85.210) 25.536 ms 21.772 ms 21.697 ms -- 11. 115.114.85.233 (115.114.85.233) 31.452 ms 34.547 ms 38.371 ms -- 12. * * if-9-5.tcore1.wyn-marseille.as6453.net (80.231.217.17) 134.437 ms -- 13. if-8-1600.tcore1.pye-paris.as6453.net (80.231.217.6) 140.244 ms 139.780 ms 139.931 ms -- 14. if-2-2.tcore1.pvu-paris.as6453.net (80.231.154.17) 132.315 ms 139.273 ms 136.092 ms -- 15. ae-7.r04.parsfr01.fr.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.8.1) 136.365 ms 139.886 ms 135.689 ms -- 16. ae-5.r02.parsfr02.fr.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.4.37) 242.899 ms 331.461 ms 307.212 ms -- 17. ae-5.r22.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.62) 149.954 ms 151.609 ms 150.101 ms -- 18. ae-0.r23.amstnl02.nl.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.4.126) 145.721 ms 145.091 ms 147.451 ms -- 19. * * * -- 20. ae-2.r06.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.7.27) 226.761 ms 262.790 ms -- ae-2.r05.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.4.41) 270.623 ms -- 21. ae-3.facebook.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (168.143.97.118) 263.718 ms ae-4.facebook.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (168.143.105.18) 317.167 ms 244.475 ms -- 22. be2.bb02.iad3.tfbnw.net (31.13.24.8) 374.290 ms 305.458 ms 244.194 ms -- 23. ae12.bb03.frc3.tfbnw.net (31.13.24.88) 268.062 ms ae17.bb03.frc3.tfbnw.net (31.13.29.220) 307.678 ms 307.757 ms -- 24. ae2.dr09.frc3.tfbnw.net (31.13.29.45) 270.561 ms ae1.dr09.frc3.tfbnw.net (31.13.29.43) 245.850 ms 241.323 ms -- 25. * * * -- 26. * * * -- 27. * * * -- 28. edge-star-shv-12-frc3.facebook.com (173.252.120.6) 240.828 ms 281.591 ms 307.277 ms
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
anmonteiro90 12y ago
I might not be as precise as I've wanted, but I've taken a class where my professor mentioned that Google has their own physical infrastructure, thus achieving such low latencies for requests in general. I'm aware that this info is not as precise as one would want, so I'd love to read comments on this!
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Google has many more colocation sites across the world. The closer their gear to you, both physically and logically (peering fabrics/agreements), the lower the latency between you and them.
staunch 12y ago
Yes, it's pretty much that simple. Google has terabits of dedicated bandwidth capacity and datacenters located all over the world. Fewer hops and a shorter physical distance to the server = lower latency.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tonyarkles 12y ago
I'm not positive, but last time I tried, when I ping www.google.com, I end up hitting a machine on my ISP's class B network, which likely means that the traffic never their own network. I'm assuming this is some kind of transparent proxy that serves static content (images, CSS, JS, etc) locally for "free" and sends all of the dynamic requests to Google. I don't have a calculator in front of me, but even taking the maximum latency of 16ms, I suspect that your proposed route is a longer distance than light could have travelled. Edit: 186 miles/millisecond according to google Edit 2: I love this story http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
iSloth 12y ago
Google run a global reverse proxy style caching service "Google Global Cache", this is where they provide servers at no charge to ISP's and direct bandwidth heavy traffic to these machines for the ISP's IP ranges, typically when this first came out they were just hosting the Youtube and local Maps traffic locally. However about a year ago they actually started to service the google.com domain from these machines, therefore that will explain the better ping response, and if you do a WHOIS on the IP range or look at the source ASN you will probably find it's your ISP and not the Google network. Akamai and Netflix offer some very similar services to ISP's if your interested in reading a bit more about it, specifically for Akamai they host a lot of the Facebook images and Apple updates/images traffic from these machines in your ISP network.
giovannibajo1 12y ago
For Facebook, ping "static.ak.fbcdn.net"; it's their Akamai CDN, and it's probably much better than the main hostname.