There are two legacy computer programs from the 1980s that are still in common use today and are available on almost all the operating systems that support IP network connections. I am talking about "ping" and "traceroute". With these tools, you can check the connectivity and the route to other devices on the internet.
Web Host Candidates
These performance findings can be important in the decision about where to host your website or blog. You want your web presence to be quick and responsive for your audience, as that often decides whether your web customers will click on more of your links and explore your web pages.
Pings
The numbers showed an average of:
- 22.258 ms for google.com
- 23.487 ms for australia.gov.au
- 186.687 ms for finland.fi
Australia is significantly further away than Google is, yet the ping times were similar. The Finland ping times were significantly longer. I believe geographical distance does matter in how quick the response time is, but there are other factors. The network route and the routers may also matter. The traceroute will probably show why the Australia site is so fast, at only 23 milliseconds to make a round trip electronically, while the continent of Australia is geographically very far.
Traceroute
Here are the traceroutes:
- Google: 18 hops
- Australia: 64 hops
- Finland: 64 hops
The number of hops does not seem to explain why Finland is so much slower than Australia. However those triple asterisks (***) hops just show timeouts without real data, so I can't know the exact route. I can guess it is the quality of the routers or the network congestion in the path to the destination that helps determine the speed. After looking up the IP addresses along the route to the www.australia.gov.au website, I found the website is hosted on an Amazon.com server farm in Illinois (USA). That can explain the ping speed to that site.
Traveling Through the Network
I had heard from an acquaintance that different countries in Southeast Asia where he travels a lot have different internet speeds, and his favorite country there is the one with the highest internet speed. This is another indication to me that geographic distance is not the only factor. I expect nations that invest more in high-speed internet technology have an advantage.
Long Hops and the Speed of Light
Internet connections through satellite can cover a long distance in 2 hops. There are trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic optical fiber cables that can cross the ocean in one hop. There is the speed of light maximum speed to consider (which is around the world seven times in one second) but that can be less significant than the routers that process the internet packets and decide which route to send them on.
The Routers Along the Way
I expect the router's computations take longer than travel across the ocean. Another factor is that it would take only one ancient slow router to add a significant amount of time to the route or a router that is overloaded with too much traffic.
In my case, hop number 3 in the traceroute adds 8 milliseconds to the route in each case. It jumps from 3ms to hop 2 to 13 milliseconds to return from to hop 3. That hop would probably be quite local, still in my city. So there you go, one router added 36% of my time delay to google.com.
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