from Hacker News

Latency of Scaleway, the cloud provider offering multicore ARM servers

by pmw on 6/25/17, 5:10 AM with 30 comments

• by deadlyllama on 6/25/17, 6:22 AM

  To anyone outside the USA, this is old hat. Yes, latency matters for interactive traffic. Yes, the Atlantic (and Pacific) oceans are big and light ain't getting any faster.

• by posnet on 6/25/17, 6:17 AM

  This has nothing to do with Scaleway, the latency results would be the same no matter the provider.

• by pasbesoin on 6/25/17, 6:38 AM

  So, where on the North American continent are people going for a small (ARM or otherwise), dedicated server that doesn't break the bank?

  A few years ago, dedicated Raspberry Pi hosting was a bit of a thing for a bit.

  I looked a bit, a few months ago, but I didn't turn up what appeared to be a clear winner of a choice.

• by bowmessage on 6/25/17, 7:13 AM

  Why not measure application response times on instance instead of at home? Would have been more interesting to see how $my_web_app runs on some t2.micros vs some arm boxes?

• by trelliscoded on 6/25/17, 7:30 AM

  I just use Cloudflare's free plan with my Scaleway servers, so Scaleway could be hosting from low earth orbit for all I care.

• by fierarul on 6/25/17, 9:08 AM

  It's interesting people are worried about this with Scaleway because I don't remember reading this with Slicehost or Amazon EC2 while they were ramping up.

  So, is the bar so much higher or is it something else?

  I used Slicehost and EC2 from Europe with total disregard for latency because I never had much users. For my (mostly internal) servers it was fast enough.

  And even now, I have the cheapest Scaleway machine with a public-facing website that seems to be running fine a small Angular4 + Java backend app.

  I would also like to see a graph showing the latencies between all the AWS regions. Which I guess will show that AWS regions do have a logic and that having servers next to your users makes sense.

  Still, why worry about this from the start when your monthly 'budget' is less than the price of your coffee breakfast and you get unmetered bandwidth?

• by Ecco on 6/25/17, 8:31 AM

  What's weird is that the distance from SF to Paris is 9000 Km, which is 30 light-ms. So the theoretical minimal latency would be 30ms.

  How comes we're 5 times above that ?

  Is the latency introduced by routers ? If yes, then that quite doesn't make sense : I doubt there is any in the middle of the Atlantic.

  Is the routing that inefficient that the data travels 50000 km ?

• by spullara on 6/25/17, 6:32 AM

  This is really obvious. You should lose karma for up voting it.

• by sargun on 6/25/17, 10:40 AM

  I highly recommend Packet.net instead of Scaleway if you care for bare metal or ARM. Their storage is local by default, which makes a huge difference in operational stability. In addition, their staff is super helpful.

  As far as ARMv8, and Erlang go, I would suggest you not bother. At least in casual testing, I found P99 latency to be massively higher than the equivalent x86. BEAM just doesn't seem to want to do a massive number of schedulers well.

• by jjeaff on 6/25/17, 9:01 AM

  I use scaleway for some of my side projects. The latency is noticeable but with a little bit of cache adjustments and a free cloudflare plan in front of it, it is fine.

  I took about 5 sites from a $50 a month shared cPanel plan that included a few WordPress blogs and some custom sites and put them on a $3 a month scaleway instance and haven't had a bit of trouble.