It’s still early days, but we’re moving hosts, the UK is no longer cost-effective, so we’re moving LB to Paris! It’ll get a big performance improvement, so pages should load quicker, and we won’t be charged astronomical rates for the amount of bandwidth we use, nor exposed to the Mickey-Mouse efforts that our current hosts show when there’s a problem bigger than a fuse blowing in the staff kitchen’s kettle.
I’ll announce more when it comes to the change-over, as there will be some temporary loss of service.
oh man, this is not good news, the latency is going to jump bigtime… most of the better datacenters are in london, which is where most of the people on this site are probably from, meaning no latency at all. Paris is a few hops away
Any chance you can get a cheapo server in Paris for the high bandwidth sections if the site like the gallery? Or a general media server to serve static files like images and css… and leave the site itself in a UK based datacenter; html will consume very little bandwidth.
to put it very simply… latency is the time it takes from when you click a link, to when the page starts to load, usually measured in milliseconds.
When you click a link, your computer will send data packets to the server… but the route it takes to get to the server often involves many hops to different intermediatry servers. The closer you and the server are, the less intermediatry hops, and therefore less time waiting for a response. When the server gets your data packets, it will respond with its own data packets, which then have to travel back to you… again involving more ‘hops’.
Every hop introduces more latency, and depending on how cheap the bandwidth is, more likelyhood of data loss.
Forums use many different ‘objects’ on the page (mainly in the form of avatars and smilies), and often show a noticable change in page load time when moved to servers further away, because every image is a separate request, and has to make a roundtrip to the server.
Correct, in terms of communication, things will be slower. But thats not the whole story; the server still has to “process” your request before it can respond to it. The idea is to reduce costs, and maybe put some of those savings into getting faster servers… so the processing time is reduced, even though the communication time is increased.
I think overall we will still see a slow down, but if a second per page slower means it will save LB lots of $$$ then… ?
Its important to mention this slow down wont be a big loss to fast broadband users… it will mainly affect the people on unstable connections who already count every second ie dial up users, weak wifi signal users, mobile broadband users, mobile phone surfers etc. etc.
Don’t get your knickers in a twist! This is a website, not a quake server fella! The latency is actually better with the new hosts as their network is so much better. LB isn’t hosted in London anyhow, but half way up our island, so the difference is irrelevant.
Part of reason we’re doing this is to increase performance, not reduce it. The new servers LB will run on are roughly eight to sixteen times more powerful than the ones it currently runs on. I’m talking quad core processors, 12gb ram, tb’s of disk-space, the whole nine-yards. They’re seriously beefy and we have er, I don’t know how many times more bandwidth, but we’ll be on 1gbit connection, as opposed to the 10mbit one we’re on now. We’re even increasing the number of servers we’ll use, and still save a lot of money, which will spread the load better across them.
If you’re still concerned, take a look at our new pro-photos service that runs on the new host:
http://motoprofessional.com - it’s quick, no? I’m showing a 20ms latency here, and that’s across wifi on a laptop with the site running on a single server, not multiple as LB will be.
