[LINK] Latency across Australia & to Europe....

Frank O'Connor francisoconnor3 at bigpond.com
Sun May 1 07:48:04 AEST 2011


Perth is in a pretty unique network location for Australia ... and 
maybe Adelaide is in the same boat.

The bottom line is that the East Coast and the rest of Australia 
typically uses the Pan-Pac links when connecting to the world wide 
Net, whilst Perth typically uses the Jasuarus and other links that go 
through Singapore (and SE Asia) or Japan. That can add to or subtract 
from the router hop count depending on your ultimate connection, 
server destination and the 'state of the network'.

I've found on more than one occasion in Perth that I was being routed 
through Japan, across to the States, and then back across the 
Trans-Pac route for a connection with Sydney or Melbourne servers, 
instead of back through the trans-Australia pipeline ... which did 
increase latency like you wouldn't believe. It's the nature of the 
Net, and what all those dinky little ICMP packets are telling routers 
about network health and routing performance ... and sometimes it 
gets it wrong (because geographic distance isn't a TCP/IP network 
determinant of how any given data packet will be routed).

By and large the built in network performance optimisation of TCP/IP 
works quite well ... but every now and then it messes up.

					Regards,

At 5:04 PM +1000 on 30/4/11 you wrote:
>Fernando Cassia wrote:
>>  On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:56 PM, Marghanita da Cruz
>>  <marghanita at ramin.com.au <mailto:marghanita at ramin.com.au>> wrote:
><snip>
>>>      Anyone care to comment/speculate on whether thehough the
>>>      local poor performance is due to capacity, route (via
>>>      singapore/satellite), distance related latency or something
>>>      else.
><snip>
>>  running "traceroute" from both locations to any given host might help
>>  you spot where the delay is.
>>
>
>Fascinating...this is what traceroute told me:
>
>To ramin.com.au there were 9 hops from my Kogan from both
>Perth (Friday morning) and Sydney (Saturday afternoon).
>
>Some of the hops, from Perth, had less latency but were of
>the same order, while a couple were of the order of three
>times the equivalent hop from Sydney.
>
>Total 3534.39ms (Syd)		4738.39ms (Perth)
>----------------------------------------------------------
>
>To another site, which I would guess would be hosted in
>Sydney, and whose performance seemed particularly poor,
>there were still 9 hops though the difference in magnitude
>was only double for the biggest discrepancies. (seems the
>performance problems may have been with the server)
>
>Total 2444.28ms (Syd)		2520.35ms (Perth)
>------------------------------------------------------------
>
>And most amazing of all to a European Site:
>21 hops 16263.72ms (from Syd)
>11 hops 13582.83ms (from Perth)
>
>Marghanita
>--
>Marghanita da Cruz
>http://ramin.com.au
>Tel: 0414-869202
>
>
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