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How do I find the lowest ping Lemmy instance?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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The point I'm making is "ping doesn't matter". If you want to go to a different instance that's fine, find one that seems responsive. You're using the wrong terminology/thinking when deciding which instance you want to be on.
It doesn’t? Something with 1000ms is going to be less responsive than 100ms geographically closer, though I don’t know how much it varies.
I assume that me, being the the US, will have a significant enough high ping by being on an instance that’s hosting in Finland. I never used the wrong terminology, just was asking about how to find the lowest ping — I only said I was trying to find the lowest ping because lemmy.world’s servers are shutting the bed. I can see where the extrapolation comes from though, didn’t make it clear enough.
Unless you're clicking through pages at record speed, 1 second latency for a web page and 100ms will be almost unnoticeable.
I just pulled Amazon.com, and on my computer it takes about 2 seconds for it to render, if we add 1 second of ping and it took 3 seconds to rend, I wouldn't notice it. Looking inside chrome tools, I see it takes 700ms to download the content on the front page. This is relative of course and I could go deeper (if the initial page, and the content server both were 1 second away, technically it could take 2 seconds because it needs two round trips) but that's kind of besides the point.
The main issue on the web is content generation/download, it's not the time to reach the server. Lag matters more in gaming because you're constantly talking to the server in a round trip constantly, so any latency is increased and will be more problematic. but with HTTP, you're sending a request and getting it back, it's a single round trip, you then will take time to parse that data and read it, and then when you're ready for more you're doing another round trip.
So if a server is 100ms or 1 second away you're only paying that penalty once in a while. The issue is if the website gets under heavy load and can't respond for multiple seconds or more, or fails to respond. That's more of an issue with server load, which is why I say to focus on that.
If you TRULY think this is an issue, go to your command line and run "ping lemmy.world" I get 189ms pings. Amazon gives me 79 ms pings. Google is 28 ms ping. Those levels will be unperceivable after you consider the rest of the time it takes to download and render a page.
The difference between 2s and 3s is actually quite large, in terms of peoples patience to stay on a website. There have been many studies on the effects of longer RTT for websites. The conclusion of most of these studies is that there are massive drop-offs in users (abandoned sessions) once you get into the 3, 4, 5s ranges.
The difference betwen 1000ms and 100ms might be massive for gaming or live video chat as that 1 second delay is very noticeable. In terms of viewing a web page, a second to send a request from click will be almost imperceptible. As there is still a few more seconds to load the data that your device anyway. So you are talking about a 5 second wait time or a 4 second wait time. It doesn't really matter.
The big difference is server load. A quiet server with a fast internet connection doesn't need to process as many requests and therefore you don't have to wait in queue. A low server load with a high ping could take a second or two while a server next door to you with 10 seconds worth of requests could take ten seconds.
The ping isn't the issue as real time delay is not the important factor here.
Try a few instances and see which feel faster. It's kind of hard to guage, although I imagine someone could build a tool that tests server responsiveness at pulling a request from a sample link and a local link on its own instance and generate a report I guess.
In most cases, the ping from the US to Europe is going to be <500ms. Half a second. Now, back when most stuff was serves up sequentially and the turnaround time from ping between getting each small file mattered. Now, page and media are pulled in one. So, really you shouldn't feel much difference.
There will be a difference, sure. But it will be negligible I'd expect. But, you can just visit some different ones and see.