Chesapeake, Great Lakes and Catskills Servers : why they have so much a different Latency ?
I was checking with the Enhanced Client Log in the Latency shown fo the various servers and I noted that, for me, the Catskills server has a roughly 2 times worse Latency as compared to Chesapeake and Great Lakes servers, with Chesapeake and Great Lakes having the same Latency for me. Just Catskills, for reasons that I cannot understand, shows a much worse Latency for me.
Aren't those 3 servers moreless located in the same area and, thus, should have moreless a similar Latency ?
Does anyone know ?
Aren't those 3 servers moreless located in the same area and, thus, should have moreless a similar Latency ?
Does anyone know ?
Comments
Never be afraid to challenge the status quo
Around this time last year, I dug around to try to understand the UO infrastructure a bit better.
The Server IP list on Stratics is a bit dated but you can still verify what the server IP is by doing a packet capture or netstat command. Most of the traffic should be on port 5002.
Once you have the IP you can do an nslookup on it. What this typically reveals is a hostname for the server. What I saw (at least as of last year) was that the servers retained the default DNS name that they received upon deployment within Amazon AWS. The good thing here is that most of the time you can see which AWS region the servers are deployed into.
For instance, Pacific is deployed in AWS' us-west-1 region or N. California. Where, specifically, in N. California are those servers are located is not something that AWS makes readily available. My current employment has me working with AWS as a very large spending enterprise customer and they withhold exact addresses but you could always get on Google Maps and probably figure it out, at least within the general vicinity and not the specific data center.
Unfortunately for the servers that you listed, they all resolve to default hostname with no regional information other than "compute-1". What this most likely means is that they either reside in us-east-1 or us-west-1 (N. Virginia or N. California) because it was a legacy AWS DNS naming standard.
This information probably doesn't help much but I hope that it at least provides some clarity on where the servers may reside.
In addition to tracert, you may run a ping <server-ip> -t for a few minutes during the times you wish to play (you may stop this by pressing ctrl+c). Once done you can then look at latency min/max/avg and lost responses. This may tell you which server's region & path are more performant from your location.
Since I "think", but without knowing where the UO Servers are geographically located this is really hard to say, that I was located closer to the "Catskills" server rather then to the Chesapeake and Great Lakes servers, I found it odd that my Latency to the Catskills server was more then twice as bad as that to the Chesapeake and Great Lakes servers...
Never be afraid to challenge the status quo