Ping - APAC Region

Sat Apr 2 21:40:58 UTC 2011

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Matthew Palmer <mpalmer at hezmatt.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 06:33:07PM +0100, Robert Lusby wrote:
>> Looking at hosting some servers in Hong Kong, to serve the APAC region. Our
>> client is worried that this may slow things down in their Australia region,
>> and are wondering whether hosting the servers in an Australian data-centre
>> would be a better option.
>>
>> Does anyone have any statistics on this?
>
> No formal statistics, just a lot of experience.  You may be unsurprised to
> learn that serving into Australia from outside Australia is slower than
> serving from within Australia.  That being said, there's a fair bit less
> distance for the light to travel from Hong Kong or anywhere in the region
> than from the US.

Given that the bulk of the population density in Australia is on the
eastern coast near Sydney, and the *only* fiber path going anywhere
near Asia from Sydney does so via Guam, the light path traveled from
Sydney to Guam to La Union (PH)  to Hong Kong isn't appreciably
shorter than the light path from Sydney to Hawaii to the US--which is
covered by roughly 6x as many fiber runs as the Guam pathway, and
is thus somewhat cheaper to get onto--you might as well host on the
west coast of the US as in Hong Kong.  (and *that* was a horrific
run-on sentence!)

If I look at average data for the past five years between Sydney and
Hong Kong, San Jose, Singapore, and Los Angeles, on average it's
better to serve Sydney from Los Angeles than Hong Kong or Singapore:

mpetach at netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE HKI
total daily data files read: 1559
AUE to HKI latency (min/avg/max): 134.216/173.273/1052.158
mpetach at netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE SJC
total daily data files read: 1558
AUE to SJC latency (min/avg/max): 149.829/176.674/308.637
mpetach at netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE SG1
total daily data files read: 1558
AUE to SG1 latency (min/avg/max): 101.871/204.485/999
mpetach at netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance> ~/tmp/avgperf.pl AUE LAX
total daily data files read: 931
AUE to LAX latency (min/avg/max): 157.603/166.720/999
mpetach at netops:/home/mrtg/public_html/performance>

> That is predicated on having good direct links, which is
> eye-wateringly expensive if you're used to US data costs (data going from
> China to Australia via San Jose...  aaargh).  Then again, hosting within
> Australia is similarly expensive, so splitting your presence isn't going to
> help you any from a cost PoV.

It's not really a matter of eye-wateringly expensive, so much as simple
basic existence; there's no direct Sydney to southern Asia fiber, at the
moment; the best you can do is hop through Papua New Guinea to
Guam, and then back across into southern Asia.  (or overshoot up to
Japan, and  then bounce your way back down from there).

Matt