Posted 11 September 2014 - 08:02 PM

Hello folks,



Some of you are having network issues and are finding your pings are much higher (30 to 40 ms) than they used to be.



This isn't the normal state of affairs. For most users, pings have decreased. Sometimes by 10ms, sometimes by a 50ms. We've put a lot of care into optimizing our network, but we still have more to go.



Some of you are seeing pings that will have gone up by 1-8 ms. This is probably normal - see my explanation below.



Some of you are seeing increases 40 or 50 ms. This is abnormal, so read on for info on what might be going on.



Q I'm on the west coast and my ping increased by a few ms, is this a problem?



Part of this is just the reality of moving 600 km east from Toronto to Montreal. It takes light ~4 ms to make a round trip between Toronto and Montreal. And chances are it won't be a straight line, either, and routers along the way will add additonal delays. So yeah, if you used to live in Toronto and had a ping time of 1 ms, it's probably 10 ms or higher now. Likewise if are on the west coast, even if you're on Google fibre, you're still going to see slightly higher ping time. If you're on the East coast, probably lower! it's just the laws of physics.



Q. Actually I'm seeing severely higher ping times, like 40 ms or more than they should be.



Please get in touch! There's a couple of reasons that could be the case, and one of them is pathing. A number of ISPs (looking at *you*, Telstra) have selected truly suboptimal paths to our datacenter. Like for instance, by crossing to China, travelling through all of Asia and Europe and then the Atlantic ocean, before arriving on the eastern coast of Canada. Not a good path.



We want to get those routes fixed. We're not the ones setting them, but we *can* apply pressure to ISPs to get them to pick better routes. What we need from you to do this, though, is a screenshot of a traceroute (using the tracert command) and your IP address. Basically, we need evidence. When we can prove to an ISP that they need to fix their routes, we're often able to get them to fix it.





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Hope that answers some of your questions. I hope to have time on Friday or later in the week to sit down with our CSRs and brief them more fully on this issue so they can respond better to your tickets. Right now the best way to get help is to let me know through this thread or by other means if you can.

