this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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Does it matter where an instance is located in terms of lag? (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by markipol@beehaw.org to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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Sorry if I say something wrong, I'm not that experienced in this area.

So, when you connect to google.com, you're not connecting to one IP regardless of location. Your request is routed to the closest google server's ip address (using anycast? Yes, I just googled this lol).

I'm guessing the Lemmy servers don't do this yet? So, would it be best to sign up to a server near you, lag wise? Especially with the continuing and ever escalating avalanche of Reddit refugees to reach a zenith on June 12-14?

I'm making this post because I was thinking of making a small website or app thing showing new users a random instance (to reduce load on lemmy.ml or any one individual server). And then that becomes the default "go here to join Lemmy" link for new users. But then I realised I could get the IP (or manually input) location of the user and randomly choose an instance out of the pool of instances nearby.

Anyways, I'm probably not gonna do this myself because lazy (I know) but I think it'd be a good idea.

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[–] honk@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

I mean yeah sure. Physical distance will affect latency negatively and this leads to increased times for establishing connections and can also affect the available bandwidth negatively. Still with todays connections it's not an issue for me to download with a couple of hundred megabit from a server on the other side of the world. So I doubt that it would have a very noticable effect on the user experience. There are far more important factors like how much load a server has and what hardware a server is running on.