
Latency of Scaleway, the cloud provider offering multicore ARM servers - pmw
http://philipmw.github.io/2017/06/24/latency-of-scaleway.html
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deadlyllama
To anyone outside the USA, this is old hat. Yes, latency matters for
interactive traffic. Yes, the Atlantic (and Pacific) oceans are big and light
ain't getting any faster.

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IshKebab
RTT based on the speed of light should be 54 ms. Say 70 ms because it won't go
as the crow flies, so could actually get twice as fast in theory.

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anilgulecha
You're discounting TCP ACK overhead, and time taken by switches.

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IshKebab
Ping doesn't use TCP and the time taken by switches can be reduced,
theoretically.

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posnet
This has nothing to do with Scaleway, the latency results would be the same no
matter the provider.

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pasbesoin
So, where on the North American continent are people going for a small (ARM or
otherwise), dedicated server that doesn't break the bank?

A few years ago, dedicated Raspberry Pi hosting was a bit of a thing for a
bit.

I looked a bit, a few months ago, but I didn't turn up what appeared to be a
clear winner of a choice.

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quillo
x86 offerings are so cheap now, is there still a market for this kind of ARM
hosting? I would argue that you will achieve at least equivalent performance
from an entry level KVM or Xen VM.

Perhaps there is still a market for the security concious or workloads
sensitive to noisy neighbours.

Somewhat of a tangent - although not small scale, I have found the packet.net
96 core ARM offering to be good value.

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bluejekyll
Correct me if I'm wrong, but ARM is much less power hungry, and produces less
heat. Both options that at scale means potential cost savings on resale.

It might not be enough to offset the other costs, but it could be enough to
offer a less costly service. At the end of the day though, half of what you
get with AWS is a ton of library support in many languages for using AWS
services.

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ferongr
>ARM is much less power hungry, and produces less heat

This seems like a myth repeated without any proof to back it up.

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bowmessage
Why not measure application response times on instance instead of at home?
Would have been more interesting to see how $my_web_app runs on some t2.micros
vs some arm boxes?

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trelliscoded
I just use Cloudflare's free plan with my Scaleway servers, so Scaleway could
be hosting from low earth orbit for all I care.

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tmikaeld
How would you speed up a dynamic real-time app with cloudflare? It'd not like
you can cache real-time results.

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trelliscoded
I don't. The stuff I host on Scaleway is there because 1) I don't want to host
it in the US, 2) an ARMv8 experiment, or 3) I need redundant bootstrap
capacity in case GCE or AWS goes down.

The dynamic stuff I host for personal use uses a variety of cloud services as
backends, and those are anycasted. One app I wrote in a hurry uses Google
Sheets as a backend, and that's worked surprisingly well for the effort it
took.

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fierarul
It's interesting people are worried about this with Scaleway because I don't
remember reading this with Slicehost or Amazon EC2 while they were ramping up.

So, is the bar so much higher or is it something else?

I used Slicehost and EC2 from Europe with total disregard for latency because
I never had much users. For my (mostly internal) servers it was fast enough.

And even now, I have the cheapest Scaleway machine with a public-facing
website that seems to be running fine a small Angular4 + Java backend app.

I would also like to see a graph showing the latencies between all the AWS
regions. Which I guess will show that AWS regions do have a logic and that
having servers next to your users makes sense.

Still, why worry about this from the start when your monthly 'budget' is less
than the price of your coffee breakfast and you get unmetered bandwidth?

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Ecco
What's weird is that the distance from SF to Paris is 9000 Km, which is 30
light-ms. So the theoretical minimal latency would be 30ms.

How comes we're 5 times above that ?

Is the latency introduced by routers ? If yes, then that quite doesn't make
sense : I doubt there is any in the middle of the Atlantic.

Is the routing that inefficient that the data travels 50000 km ?

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pfg
What people typically mean when they say speed of light is the speed in
vacuum. For optical fibers, you can reduce that number by about 30%. It's also
unlikely that there is a straight line from A to B, and each network hop will
introduce additional latency - there are > 10 hops from my home connection to
Scaleway, and that's with both ends located in Europe.

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Ecco
Good points. The 30% increase and the not-straight-distance could explain a
50% slowdown. But here we have a 500% difference.

Also the number of hops probably isn't really relevant : there probably isn't
any router in the middle of the Atlantic, and just like you said there is
already a bunch of router on an European-only route whose latency would most
likely be below 10ms.

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pfg
It's not really a question of where the hops are located. There'll be a couple
of them in Europe and a couple in NA. Each will introduce a bit of latency.

The numbers from the article are also round-trip times (that's what you get
with the ping command), so you'd have to double whatever number you come up
with from the one-way distance alone.

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effie
> _The numbers from the article are also round-trip times (that 's what you
> get with the ping command), so you'd have to double whatever number you come
> up with from the one-way distance alone._

Indeed, the theoretical minimum ping time for 9000km is 60ms.

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spullara
This is really obvious. You should lose karma for up voting it.

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codinghorror
I was hoping this would show us some benchmarks, that is, an Apple A10X ARM
based server could be pretty darn fast based on the perf metrics I've seen.
And off the damn charts in terms of power per watt. Not that Apple is selling
any, but _cough_ theyshouldbe

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sargun
I highly recommend Packet.net instead of Scaleway if you care for bare metal
or ARM. Their storage is local by default, which makes a huge difference in
operational stability. In addition, their staff is super helpful.

As far as ARMv8, and Erlang go, I would suggest you not bother. At least in
casual testing, I found P99 latency to be massively higher than the equivalent
x86. BEAM just doesn't seem to want to do a massive number of schedulers well.

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Osiris
Packet.net's cheapest server looks to be about $37/mn while you can get a
Scaleway server starting at about $3. I run a small website and I use Scaleway
despite the latency because I don't want to spend more than a few dollars a
month.

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jjeaff
I use scaleway for some of my side projects. The latency is noticeable but
with a little bit of cache adjustments and a free cloudflare plan in front of
it, it is fine.

I took about 5 sites from a $50 a month shared cPanel plan that included a few
WordPress blogs and some custom sites and put them on a $3 a month scaleway
instance and haven't had a bit of trouble.

