Server lag, reducing international lag?

[johnivey]

Hey everyone, I started a discussion about how i have a server that has a slight lag problem for my friends who connect from the UK. However, I was thinking asking a question wouldn't hurt. Is there any way I can reduce ping time/lag for my friends from the UK? Possibly by running my IP through a proxy or some such thing? Any and all help would be appreciated!

Side note: There is virtually zero lag on my side as well as from one of the players in Canada(server is US based).

 

[COLGeek]

Running through a proxy might even make the lag worse. There really is no way to lose the lag in the situation you describe. Really just a matter of physics and distance.

 

[ronintexas]

The DNS servers utilized by your friends in the UK could be the cause of the ping times. Are they all using the same DNS services - and is it possible to utilize something like Google DNS and/or OpenDNS?

 

[johnivey]

The DNS servers utilized by your friends in the UK could be the cause of the ping times. Are they all using the same DNS services - and is it possible to utilize something like Google DNS and/or OpenDNS?

Sorry man i'm not 100% sure how to go about that or even exactly what it means. I can try to familiarize myself with it though. Thanks for the answer!

 

[johnivey]

Running through a proxy might even make the lag worse. There really is no way to lose the lag in the situation you describe. Really just a matter of physics and distance.

Alright, thanks for the quick reply! Do you have any suggestions on a private server hosting company? Also, do you know how they(the private companies) are able to minimize lag and ping times?

 

[bill001g]

Yes they do have a sorta solution for this. It only helps certain application that are being constrained by the latency but not the capacity.

You will find much discussion on this topic ...the problem is generally referred to as long fat pipe.

If you have lots of money ...like $100k or so. A company called riverbed makes devices to solve these type of issues.

Microsoft to a point fixed a lot of this by adopting some of the tcpip window size options but there is still only solve the problem partially and things like XP do not support it.

The way things like riverbed works is they sit in the middle and issue fake messages to try to get the end machines to transmit data faster. In effect if you ping the far end the appliance at your site would respond to the ping. So now you can ping anywhere and your latency is only 1ms. Obviously they don't do that with ping but they do fake other messages so the sever will think the other end received and send more data. Needless to say bad things happen if they are not really careful when they are faking messages that say data was received and it actually got lost.

 

[COLGeek]

DNS servers are the systems that act like phone books, they translate URL (internet addresses like www.google.com) into the Internet Protocal addresses (like 8.8.8.8 which is Google's DNS server). Using a local DNS server, vice one farther away (network-wise) can help with the time it takes to look up addresses and then access them.

Private companies often have mirrored servers in multiple locations to minimize lag. This can minimize user lag time in some cases, but increases the cost and complexity of managing multiple servers.

A good company for services in North American (US and Canada) and the UK is 1 and 1 (http://www.1and1.com/).

 

[mathew7]

You can't do much. How the ISPs backbone is configured, you already get the best path. The protocols used by ISPs are much more complicated than what you get as end-user. Your packets are diplicated on every paths and the fastest one will already be chosen dinamically. Your packets may even change routes during a normal TCP communication without your computer knowing about (ok...maybe TTL would be different).
The only option would be to try another ISP with a different backbone (which actually nobody will tell you....if they know that is).

PS: forget about DNS. That is used only at the beginning and the client will cache it. So once the client got your IP address, DNS is irrelevant (that is for 2nd ping onwards...actually DNS is only used before the 1st ping is sent).

 

[johnivey]

Alright, thanks everyone for your help! I'm giving the best answer to COLGeek sinceI found that he answered first and practically every single question i had and thanks to everyone else for filling in the blanks!