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 of 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 fifteen regions.

• Iowa, US Central
• Oregon, US West
• North Virginia, US East
• South Carolina, US East
• Belgium, Europe
• London, Europe
• Frankfurt, Germany
• Singapore, South East Asia
• Taiwan, East Asia
• Tokyo, North Asia
• Sydney, Australia
• Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Mumbai, India
• Montreal, Canada
• Netherlands, Europe

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

View the latency data in full page

• Green = Less than 100 ms
• Orange = Between 100 to 200 ms
• Red = Above 300 ms

Interesting…

• Sydney & 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.