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

13 points

12 years ago

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.

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev google.com: 8.990/10.943/16.533/1.501 ms, yahoo.com: 262.387/331.857/465.871/47.595 ms, facebook.com: 239.865/299.477/420.529/37.281 ms, twitter.com: 298.604/349.843/474.227/38.724 ms

I did a traceroute to see what's happening. The path to google seems to be: Bangalore(India) --> Chennai(India) --> Mumbai(India) --> Mountain View(US) --> Atlanta(US) --> New York(US)

And the path to facebook seems to be: Bangalore(India) --> Mumbai(India) --> Marseille(France) --> Paris(France) --> Hong Kong --> New York(US) --> Tokyo(Japan) --> Milpitas(US) --> Singapore --> Ashburn(US) --> Dulles(US) --> Forest City(US) --> Dublin(Ireland) --> Forest City(US)

What'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't? What do the routes from other countries to google/facebook look like?

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