[CountVonGuetzli]

It would be really cool if it didn't just show the ping, but how much worse it is compared to the theoretical optimum (speed of light in fiber optic medium, which I believe is about 30% slower than c).

I raise this because I've been in multiple system architecture meetings where people were complaining about latency between data centers, only to later realize that it was pretty close to what is theoretically possible in the first place.

[eitally]

I'm under the impression that within the hyperscalers (and probably the big colo/hosting firms, too), this is known. It's important to them, and customers, especially when a customer is trying to architect an HA or DR system and needs to ensure they don't inadvertently choose a region (or even a zone that isn't physically in the same place at other zones in the same region) that has "artificially" (can be for all kinds of legitimate reasons) latency from the primary zone.

This is not an uncommon scenario. My current employer specializes in SAP migrations to cloud and this is now a conversation we have with both AWS & GCP networking specialists when pricing & scoping projects... after having made incorrect assumptions and being bitten by unacceptable latency in the past.

[nullindividual]

Doesn't look like this is a ping[0]! Which is good. Rather it is a socket stream connecting over tcp/443. Ping (ICMP) would be a poor metric.

[0] https://github.com/mda590/cloudping.co/blob/8918ee8d7e632765...

[sulandor]

ping is synonymous with echo-request, which is largely transport agnostic.

but you're right

[dopp0]

why 443? are you assuming ssl here? serious question, I'm not sure. But if it is, wouldn't it be hard to disregard the weight of SSL in the metric?

[nabla9]

You would have to map out the cables to do that.

Light in fiber optic cable travels roughly 70% of the speed of light ~210,000 km/s Earth's circumferences is ~40,000 kilometers. Direct route from the other side of Earth to another would be roughly 100 milliseconds, round trip 200 ms.

[Bluecobra]

It’s pretty trivial to do this, any big fiber company will provide you with Google Earth KMZ files (protected by NDA) when considering a purchase. This is absolutely necessary when designing a redundant network or if you want lower latency.

[ls65536]

Since light travels at 100% the speed of light in a vacuum (by definition), I have wondered if latency over far distances could be improved by sending the data through a constellation of satellites in low earth orbit instead. Though I suspect the set of tradeoffs here (much lower throughput, much higher cost, more jitter in the latency due to satellites constantly moving around relative to the terrestrial surface) probably wouldn't make this worth it for a slight decrease in latency for any use case.

[not_kurt_godel]

Cable mapping would be nice but 100ms is a meaningfully long amount of time to make straight-line comparison worthwhile

[londons_explore]

clicking around that map, I don't see any examples where the latency is a long way out of line with the distance.

Obviously it's theoretically possible to do ~40% better by using hollow fibers and as-the-crow-flies fiber routing, but few are willing to pay for that.

[sebzim4500]

The 'practical' way to beat fiber optics is to use either

(i) a series of overground direct microwave connections (often used by trading firms)

(ii) a series of laser links between low altitude satellites. This would be faster in principle for long distances, and presumably Starlink will eventually offer this service to people that are very latency sensitive

[plantain]

AU <-> South Africa & South America is way less than distance.

[bddicken]

Author here - Interesting. Someone on X also gave this idea to me. Any good resources for how to accurately compute this?

[dgemm]

The theoretical best latency would be something like speed_of_light_in_fiber/great_circle_distance_between_regions, both of which are pretty easy to find. The first is a constant you can look up, and the second you can compute from coordinates of each region pair.

[liveoneggs]

IIRC about 125 miles per ms