[Foundation-l] [Internal-l] Relocation Announcement

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 9/25/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> As someone located in California, the BBC loads orders of magnitude
> faster for me pretty much every time, despite being across the ocean.

BBC has a rather expansive international network infrastructure.
http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/network/

Beyond that, the many of the bytes in the bbc pages are served out of
[[Akamai]]. Akamai has servers *everywhere* and costs about a gillion
dollars per mbit.

>From my home:
[gmaxwell at bessel ~]$ ping newsimg.bbc.co.uk
PING a1733.g.akamai.net (65.121.214.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 65.121.214.8: icmp_seq=0 ttl=57 time=4.34 ms

And I thought my 50 ms ping time to tampa was good!

So the notion that the BBC page is coming from the UK, just as the
notion that Wikipedia page data is coming from Florida is (hopefully)
incorrect for someone in Korea.

> If
> transatlantic distances were the main factor, the BBC ought to be
> perceptibly slow (it isn't, it loads nearly instantly), while Wikipedia
> ought to be fast (it isn't, it takes time before it even starts serving
> me pages, especially on large pages).

Log out then clear any en.wikipedia.org cookies. Or try a wp you don't
log into like German. Who knows what cache killing user preferences or
scripts you have set...

For readers Wikipedia is usually quite quick. It doesn't have the help
of an Akamai server 4ms away from you, but a typical random wikipedia
page will make only 4 or 5 http requests vs 49 for the BBC home page

If you are a reasonable distance from one of the Wikimedia clusters
and logged out Wikipedia should be one of the more quickly loading
pages. Not as fast as some of the big commercial sites using expensive
CDNs which have servers around every corner, but fairly fast. For me
the BBC pages and large wikipedia articles load in about the same
time.