physical distances vs. net distances

[Jesse Keating]

On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 22:30 -0500, Paul wrote:
> > Jeff's comment about grabbing from a local mirror got me thinking
> about 
> > distances to mirrors. So, I tried tracing the route to my local 
> > University of Wisconsin, Madison mirror about 5 Miles down the road
> in 
> > the Comp. Sci. building.  For some odd reason sbcglobal is routing
> that 
> > traffic through Chicago, Ill and back, about a 300 mile round
> trip.  
> > Pinging is fast and my dsl line to always maxed out.  There must be
> some 
> > bizarrely fat pipes between Madison and Chicago;  I might as well
> look 
> > for a mirror in Chicago.
> > -dtf
> 
> Similar situation here ... I've found that physical distance has
> little
> to do with throughput.  Charter used to route traffic though NY/SF ...
> I
> sometimes would get faster throughput by downloading from European or
> Asian sites.  I still do use the UW Madison mirror since I figure my
> tax
> dollars are paying for it and I should use it instead of somebody
> else's.
> 

For the most part, intra-continental routing has little difference to
your download speed, unless it is something like Alaska to Florida or
Seattle to New York type thing.  Usually very very high bandwidth lines
are used in such long jumps before breaking down into lower bandwidth
and dispersing out over an area.  However INTER-continental traffic has
to go under the pond if you will and there is a lot of latency (and
cost) there.  This is why using a mirror in your country or continent
will be much more preferred than crossing an ocean to get your files.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (geek.j2solutions.net)
Fedora Legacy Team      (www.fedoralegacy.org)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
 
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