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  1. #1

    Searching for server with fastest connection to servers in Europe and Asia-Pacific

    Dear Web Hosting Users,
    I'm seeking for your advice in choosing best dedicated server provider who can handle my requirements.

    What I need is to minimize the time needed to retrieve data from 2 servers - server#1 is located somewhere in Europe (most probably Sweden) and the server#2 is located somewhere in Asia Pacific (Philippines or Hong Kong). I don't know for sure where as they do not respond to ping - I used visual trace route to find approximate physical location. When using tracert singnal is lost after a few hops (Request timed out). Unfortunately I cannot share IPs as these are private servers.

    How the operation looks like:
    1. My dedicated server regurarly calls server#1 and server#2 API to get the data (every 1 sec but if possible I would like to change it even to 0.2 sec)
    2. When data is retrieved I store it in Postgresql database (multiple small INSERTs/UPDATEs) and later perform some short calculations using custom-made application written in C (calculation takes around 2 sec to complete but uses CPU heavily)
    3. When calculation is done I need to send response back to server # 1 or server # 2 as soon as possible
    Single call to server may retrieve many data sets (typically around 100) and all of them need to be calculated separately in parallel.

    My current server is hosted by SoYouStart in Canadian data center:
    Processor Intel Xeon E3 1245v2
    Cores/Threads 4 cores/ 8 threads
    Frequency 3.4 GHz+
    RAM 32GB DDR3
    Disks 3 x 120 GB SSD
    RAID Soft
    Network connection 1 Gbps

    I find it way too slow to:
    1. connect quickly to the server#1 and server#2 - for both servers it takes more than 2 sec to send request and get data back
    2. handle so many operations in parallel - CPU is 100% almost all the time, while there is still a lot of RAM unused (>16 GB)

    What setup would you recommend? I'm especially interested how to configure network setup to reduce latency.
    If more details is needed please let me know.

    Thank you very much for your help.

    Gunter

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Oct 2012
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    Miami, FL
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    For fast connections to Europe networks, a server from East Coast will be your best bet. However, that same server will NOT have a good latency to Asia-Pacific as it is on the other side of the globe, most likely with fastest ping from West Coast.

    As for the processor struggling all the time, you might want to look at a dual processor server instead of a single socket, increasing core count might help for highly parallel workloads.

  3. #3
    @rogriverac - thanks for reply
    Setup you described is similar to what I have right now, i.e. connections to Europe are quite fine, but connections to Asia are below my expectations.

    Is there any way to change the routing between source and destination so the number of hops between is reduced? In current configuration tracert returns 12 hops to reach destination in Europe and more than 25 to get to Asia.

    As for the computing power - I will consider changing the hardware as per your suggestion.

  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by rogriverac View Post
    For fast connections to Europe networks, a server from East Coast will be your best bet. However, that same server will NOT have a good latency to Asia-Pacific as it is on the other side of the globe, most likely with fastest ping from West Coast.

    As for the processor struggling all the time, you might want to look at a dual processor server instead of a single socket, increasing core count might help for highly parallel workloads.
    It would actually make more sense to get a server in Europe than a server in the East Coast, in my honest opinion.
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  5. #5
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    OP post title implies he's looking for a server with fastest connection *TO* servers in Europe and Asia-Pacific. I assume that means from outside Europe. But that is to the OP to clarify.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by gunter80 View Post
    @rogriverac - thanks for reply
    Setup you described is similar to what I have right now, i.e. connections to Europe are quite fine, but connections to Asia are below my expectations.

    Is there any way to change the routing between source and destination so the number of hops between is reduced? In current configuration tracert returns 12 hops to reach destination in Europe and more than 25 to get to Asia.

    As for the computing power - I will consider changing the hardware as per your suggestion.
    Probably a provider with a Route-Optimized network would help modifying prefix announcements through best paths over BGP. Noction's IRP and Internap MIRO comes to mind. However, due to physical conditions it would never be able to match latency from Europe with those to/from Asia-Pacific.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Jul 2014
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    74
    Don't most routes from Asia to Europe go through the US anyway?

    In terms of reliability, you should be pretty good with a server at any good host in the US since you'll have good connectivity to both Asia and Europe. But it's probably better to emphasize connectivity to Asia because bandwidth to Europe is cheap and most providers won't have a problem there. So you should look into West Coast hosts to try to optimize for the worst link.

    You can check for network reliability by testing cheap VPS located in datacenters you're interested in or just ask them for a shell to test with. For example, I was getting a quote from Quadranet they set up a dedicated for me to test with, or you can try Crowncloud's VPS in their LA datacenter. Monitor ping times and download speeds and you can find a good place for your needs.


    Are you on a tight budget (since you're using Soyoustart)? Because you'll probably have to pay 2-3x for a beefy server anywhere else. I don't think SYS gives satisfactory network conditions though, since people use them for heavy torrenting, you're on the cheapest bulk routes, and their SLA is low (SYS is intended for "personal use" after all). The hardware prices are damn good but you get what you pay for in terms of network.

    Is it your database that's CPU-bound or your C program that calculates? If you've optimized those as much as you could, then you definitely need to go for dual-socket E5 servers to get maximum performance since that seems to be your constraint. Or one idea is to take advantage of SYS's cheap hardware and buy multiple dedicated servers there since you're CPU bound. Then get a VPS with good network connectivity to your remote servers and use it to forward traffic to SYS. This is under the assumption that USA -> SYS Canada connection is very good, but obviously you have to test that.

    Here's an example of simple ping monitoring with munin. I was interested in ping times to my server in mainland China and this LA datacenter was 200-400ms faster than the one I had in Michigan, way more than just the distance between LA and MI. That was just a matter of poor routes. The difference to well-connected Asia servers in Hong Kong or Japan won't nearly be as drastic though.
    Click image for larger version. 

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    Last edited by allanw; 05-25-2016 at 02:24 AM.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jul 2014
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    74
    Can't edit my above post anymore, but I'll add:
    If you can't ping the servers, I'm sure you can use tcpping or just monitor latency with the program that you're using to retrieve data off them. If latency and download speed are so important to you, then you need to figure out ways of measuring them and you need to monitor it.

  9. #9
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    I think you should check Softlayer as well as they have Asia+EU locations.

  10. #10
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    Jun 2011
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    sometime, Europe server got better speed to Asia than a USA server. It really depend the upstream network provider also.

  11. #11
    In fact I have one dedicated server in OVH (France) and other in SoYouStart (Canada) as I thought connection from Canada will work better but it does not.

    tcping (thanks for hint!) statistics:
    OVH server in France:
    - average ping to European target server: 25 ms
    - average ping to Asian target server: 280 ms

    SoYouStart server in Canada:
    - average ping to European target server: 110 ms
    - average ping to Asian target server: 240 ms

    As for the budget I can easily spend 1000euro/month (or more if needed) if it is possible to get ping < 50ms for each target server.
    Any ideas how to do it? Maybe instead of dedicated server I should focus on cloud? What about using Tor?

  12. #12
    It seems that I will stay with OVH in one of their French data centers.

    Next thing is to choose best machine from they offer to fit my purposes (see my first post).
    There are two options I consider:
    1. Dedicated server with 2 x E5 E5-2670 v2 (2.5 GHz) + 256 GB RAM
    2. Cloud based machine with E5-2687W v3 (3.1 GHz) + 60 GB for 16vCores or 120 GB for 32 vCores

    Here are my concerns:
    1. System is heavy I/O (short updates / inserts on database, dumping multiple small files to disk) - what would give best performance: 3x300 GB SSD (dedicated) or 2x4TB SAS (dedicated) or 1600 GB HA Block Storage (cloud) or single 800GB SSD (cloud)?
    2. System performs multiple mathematical computations in parallel (up to 100 threads at once) and uses a lot of CPU. Dedicated server has 2 physical processors with 10 cores each but clock is only 2.5 GHz. Cloud-based version is faster (3.1 GHz) has 16vCores or 32vCores - how does it relate to physical cores? What would work better?

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
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    Hong Kong, China
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    Dedicated server will be better than opt for a Cloud based machine, if you does not have any budget limit.
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  14. #14
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    Jul 2014
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    Quote Originally Posted by gunter80 View Post
    1. System is heavy I/O (short updates / inserts on database, dumping multiple small files to disk) - what would give best performance: 3x300 GB SSD (dedicated) or 2x4TB SAS (dedicated) or 1600 GB HA Block Storage (cloud) or single 800GB SSD (cloud)?
    2. System performs multiple mathematical computations in parallel (up to 100 threads at once) and uses a lot of CPU. Dedicated server has 2 physical processors with 10 cores each but clock is only 2.5 GHz. Cloud-based version is faster (3.1 GHz) has 16vCores or 32vCores - how does it relate to physical cores? What would work better?
    Ask for IOPs for those cloud storage solutions. There's no way we'd know their speed. The fastest commonly available write performance would probably be a dedicated server with 4x RAID-10 SSDs. Or look into PCI-E / NVMe SSD for better performance. Cloud server IO and CPU performance would depend on other customer workloads.

    Cloud servers make more sense if you have unpredictable workloads and can save money by spinning up and down instances all the time. If your server is being used 24/7 then you should get a dedicated server.

    Quote Originally Posted by gunter80 View Post
    As for the budget I can easily spend 1000euro/month (or more if needed) if it is possible to get ping < 50ms for each target server.
    Any ideas how to do it? Maybe instead of dedicated server I should focus on cloud? What about using Tor?
    Cloud or dedicated, you need to get a test server on the network you're evaluating or ask the salesperson to give you a ping time. With your budget I'm sure you can find many dedicated server providers that can give you a good custom quote. Have you asked any?

    I don't think it's possible for a server to have <50 ms ping to both Asia and Europe. You're looking at a sum of at least 200 ms. Tor isn't going to help, this is a speed of light limitation... Theoretically if you place your server in Eastern Europe / Central Asia you'll be equidistant to your destination servers, but the internet connectivity there is pretty poor...

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