

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

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.<p>round-trip min&#x2F;avg&#x2F;max&#x2F;stddev
google.com: 8.990&#x2F;10.943&#x2F;16.533&#x2F;1.501 ms, 
yahoo.com: 262.387&#x2F;331.857&#x2F;465.871&#x2F;47.595 ms, 
facebook.com: 239.865&#x2F;299.477&#x2F;420.529&#x2F;37.281 ms, 
twitter.com: 298.604&#x2F;349.843&#x2F;474.227&#x2F;38.724 ms<p>I did a traceroute to see what&#x27;s happening. The path to google seems to be:
Bangalore(India) --&gt; Chennai(India) --&gt; Mumbai(India) --&gt; Mountain View(US) --&gt; Atlanta(US) --&gt; New York(US)<p>And the path to facebook seems to be:
Bangalore(India) --&gt; Mumbai(India) --&gt; Marseille(France) --&gt; Paris(France) --&gt; Hong Kong --&gt; New York(US) --&gt; Tokyo(Japan) --&gt; Milpitas(US) --&gt; Singapore --&gt; Ashburn(US) --&gt; Dulles(US) --&gt; Forest City(US) --&gt; Dublin(Ireland) --&gt; Forest City(US)<p>What&#x27;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&#x27;t? What do the routes from other countries to google&#x2F;facebook look like?
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msravi
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

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tonyarkles
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)

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iSloth
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.

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anmonteiro90
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
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.

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staunch
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.

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giovannibajo1
For Facebook, ping "static.ak.fbcdn.net"; it's their Akamai CDN, and it's
probably much better than the main hostname.

