Lately, I started working on a hobby project (Site Relic) to test website performance, taking a screenshot, security check from multiple locations.
Having server requirement in multiple locations means I have to consider the internal latency as a server will talk to each other to deliver the requested content from requested location.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is known for low latency, and I am happy with Geek Flare performance which is hosted on GCP.
You can check the latency to GCP over the Internet by using online latency tool such as Cloud Harmony.
However, I couldn’t find any resource which gives an indication about latency between Google Cloud regions.
So I thought to do a little test myself and here is the result.
Google Cloud is available in the following nine regions.
- Iowa, US Central
- Oregon, US West
- North Virginia, US East
- South Carolina, US East
- Belgium, Europe
- London, Europe
- Singapore, South East Asia
- Taiwan, East Asia
- Tokyo, North Asia
I provisioned f1-micro instance in all the region with Ubuntu 16 LTS.
I didn’t install any additional software and did a ping to another region server 10 times over private IP.
ping –c 10 $PRIVATE_IP_ADDRESS_OF_OTHER_REGION
And here you go with the average latency results in milliseconds.
Google Cloud Latency Between Region
| FROM | TO | ||||||||
| Iowa | Oregon | N. Virginia | S. Carolina | Belgium | London | Singapore | Taiwan | Tokyo | |
| Iowa, | N.A. | 34.160 | 25.479 | 36.191 | 104.941 | 102.188 | 198.484 | 152.084 | 126.278 |
| Oregon | 34.004 | N.A. | 58.886 | 66.677 | 138.438 | 134.971 | 167.694 | 118.593 | 90.967 |
| N. Virginia | 25.079 | 58.975 | N.A. | 12.681 | 81.958 | 76.492 | 218.245 | 174.454 | 149.463 |
| S. Carolina | 36.170 | 66.600 | 12.613 | N.A. | 93.073 | 87.620 | 224.312 | 185.532 | 161.097 |
| Belgium | 105.028 | 138.463 | 82.027 | 93.134 | N.A. | 6.221 | 302.883 | 254.764 | 227.331 |
| London, | 102.234 | 134.631 | 77.424 | 87.798 | 6.248 | N.A. | 290.909 | 249.219 | 229.724 |
| Singapore | 198.900 | 158.025 | 220.742 | 224.296 | 303.370 | 288.411 | N.A. | 47.611 | 68.093 |
| Taiwan | 152.108 | 118.609 | 176.322 | 185.527 | 254.624 | 248.897 | 49.050 | N.A. | 38.299 |
| Tokyo | 124.295 | 99.482 | 149.450 | 161.128 | 227.292 | 223.412 | 68.116 | 38.279 | N.A. |
- Green = Less than 100 ms
- Orange = Between 100 to 200 ms
- Red = Above 300 ms
Interesting…
- Singapore got high latency from/to all the regions.
- Oregon perform better to connect to Asia
- Tokyo got the lowest latency to connect to Asia and US
- London play better in Europe
Above should give you an idea where to host your services internally for better results. Are you using Google Cloud yet?
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