Posts Tagged ‘latency’

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog, and this week, we’re happy to welcome David Mytton, Founder of ServerDensity. Server Density is a hosted server and website monitoring service that alerts you when your website is slow, down or back up.

5 Ways to Minimize Downtime During Summer Vacation

It’s a fact of life that everything runs smoothly until you’re out of contact, away from the Internet or on holiday. However, you can’t be available 24/7 on the chance that something breaks; instead, there are several things you can do to ensure that when things go wrong, the problem can be managed and resolved quickly. To help you set up your own “get back up” plan, we’ve come up with a checklist of the top five things you can do to prepare for an ill-timed issue.

1. Monitoring

How will you know when things break? Using a tool like Server Density — which combines availability monitoring from locations around the world with internal server metrics like disk usage, Apache and MySQL — means that you can be alerted if your site goes down, and have the data to find out why.

Surprisingly, the most common problems we see are some that are the easiest to fix. One problem that happens all too often is when a customer simply runs out of disk space in a volume! If you’ve ever had it happen to you, you know that running out of space will break things in strange ways — whether it prevents the database from accepting writes or fails to store web sessions on disk. By doing something as simple as setting an alert to monitor used disk space for all important volumes (not just root) at around 75%, you’ll have proactive visibility into your server to avoid hitting volume capacity.

Additionally, you should define triggers for unusual values that will set off a red flag for you. For example, if your Apache requests per second suddenly drop significantly, that change could indicate a problem somewhere else in your infrastructure, and if you’re not monitoring those indirect triggers, you may not learn about those other problems as quickly as you’d like. Find measurable direct and indirect relationships that can give you this kind of early warning, and find a way to measure them and alert yourself when something changes.

2. Dealing with Alerts

It’s no good having alerts sent to someone who isn’t responding (or who can’t at a given time). Using a service like Pagerduty allows you to define on-call rotations for different types of alerts. Nobody wants to be on-call every hour of every day, so differentiating and channeling alerts in an automated way could save you a lot of hassle. Another huge benefit of a platform like Pagerduty is that it also handles escalations: If the first contact in the path doesn’t wake up or is out of service, someone else gets notified quickly.

Click to read ServerDensity’s last three tips. »

SoftLayer is on the “bleeding edge” of technology, and that’s right where I’m comfortable. I love being a part of something new and relevant. I also love science fiction and find that it’s mixing together with reality more and more these days. Yay for me and my nerdyness! Beam me up Luke Skywalker! (I wonder how many nerds cringed at that statement!)

In a recent post from New Scientist, a test showed neutrino particles being clocked faster than the speed of light, and a dimension-hop might be the reason. Rather than go into the nerdy parts of the article that I’m sure you read before continuing to this sentence, I want to compare how SoftLayer would use this to our (and more importantly our customers’) advantage: A neutrino network! We could have the fastest network in the world, and we could use the technology for faster motherboards and components too. Because that’s how we roll.

Enter science fiction. Let’s say neutrinos were indeed using another dimension to travel. Like, say, the 8th dimension as referred to in “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.” This dimension also happens to be a prison used by the Lectroids of Planet 10 to store criminals. Go figure, right? Obstacles always come up, so if our neutrino network was targeted by those Lectroids, Dody Lira and the abuse team would have no problems taking them down … After all, Lectroid’s fiddling with data can be bad for business (Not to mention the possibility of Lectroid’s using our network to come back to this dimension, wreak havoc, and eat all our junk food). Dody would have to upgrade some of the tools his team uses, like a Jet Car with an “Oscillation Overthruster” (which looks eerily similar to the Flux Capacitor) to travel in and out of the 8th dimension to hunt down those pesky Lectroids that won’t comply.

Then, after Dody and crew wrangle the Lectroids (as I’m sure they would), we could offer the Lectroids email and Internet service. Bam! More customers on top of a supernatural network!

Coming back to reality (a bit), we have an interesting world ahead of us. Technologies we have only seen in movies and some we haven’t even imagined yet are becoming reality! If they fall into the usable realm of SoftLayer, you can bet we’ll be one of the first to share them with the world. But not before we get all the bugs (and Lectroids) out.

-Brad

Some of the most innovative developments on the Internet are coming from online game developers looking to push the boundaries of realism and interactivity. Developing an online gaming platform that can support a wide range of applications, including private chat, avatar chats, turn-based multiplayer games, first-person shooters, and MMORPGs, is no small feat.

Our high speed, global network significantly minimizes reliability, access, latency, lag and bandwidth issues that commonly challenge online gaming. Once users begin to experience issues of latency, reliability, they are gone and likely never to return. Our cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting solutions enable game developers to rapidly test, deploy and manage rich interactive media on a secure platform.

Consider the success of one of our partners — Electrotank Inc. They’ve been able to support as many as 6,500 concurrent users on just ONE server in a realistic simulation of a first-person shooter game, and up to 330,000 concurrent users for a turn-based multiplayer game. Talk about server density.

This is just scratching the surface because we’re continuing to build our global footprint to reduce latency for users around the world. This means no awkward pauses, jumping around, but rather a smooth, seamless, interactive online gaming experience. The combined efforts of SoftLayer’s infrastructure and Electrotank’s performant software have produced a high-performance networking platform that delivers a highly scalable, low latency user experience to both gamers and game developers.

You can read more about how Electrotank is leveraging SoftLayer’s unique network platform in today’s press release or in the fantastic white paper they published with details about their load testing methodology and results.

We always like to hear our customers opinions so let us know what you think.

-@nday91

Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, on August 3, 1492, with the goal of reaching the East Indies by traveling West. He fortuitously failed by stumbling across the New World and the discovery that the world was round – a globe. In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman calls this discovery “Globalization 1.0,” or an era of “countries globalizing.” As transportation and technology grew and evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “Globalization 2.0″ brought an era of “companies globalizing,” and around the year 2000, we moved into “Globalization 3.0″:

The dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 – the force that gives it its unique character – is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. And the phenomenon that is enabling, empowering, and enjoining individuals and small groups to go global so easily and so seamlessly is what I call the flat-world platform.

Columbus discovered the world wasn’t flat, we learned how to traverse that round world, and we keep making that world more and more accessible. He found out that the world was a lot bigger than everyone thought, and since his discovery, the smartest people on the planet have worked to make that huge world smaller and smaller.

The most traditional measure of globalization is how far “out” political, economical and technological changes extend. Look at the ARPANET network infrastructure in 1971 and a map of the Internet as it is today.

With every step Columbus took away from the Old World, he was one step closer to the New World. If you look at the growth of the Internet through that lens, you see that every additional node and connection added to the Internet brings connectivity closer to end-users who haven’t had it before. Those users gain access to the rest of the Internet, and the rest of the Internet gains access to the information and innovation those users will provide.

Globalization in Hosting

As technology and high speed connectivity become more available to users around the world, the hosting industry has new markets to reach and serve. As Lance explained in a keynote session, “50% of the people in the world are not on the Internet today. They will be on the Internet in the next 5-10 years.”

Understanding this global shift, SoftLayer can choose from a few different courses of action. Today, 40+% of our customers reside outside the United States of America, and we reach those customers via 2,000+ Gbps of network connectivity from transit and peering relationships with other networks around the world, and we’ve been successful. If the Internet is flattening the world, a USA-centric infrastructure may be limiting, though.

Before we go any further, let’s take a step back and look at a map of the United States with a few important overlays:

The three orange circles show the rough equivalents of the areas around our data centers in Seattle, Dallas and Washington, D.C., that have less than 40 milliseconds of latency directly to that facility. The blue circle on the left shows the same 40ms ring around our new San Jose facility (in blue to help avoid a little confusion). If a customer can access their host’s data center directly with less than 40ms of latency, that customer will be pretty happy with their experience.

When you consider that each of the stars on the map represents a point of presence (PoP) on the SoftLayer private network, you can draw similar circles around those locations to represent the area within 40ms of the first on-ramp to our private network. While Winnipeg, Manitoba, isn’t in one of our data center’s 40ms rings, a user there would be covered by the Chicago PoP’s coverage, and once the user is on the SoftLayer network, he or she has a direct, dedicated path to all of our data centers, and we’re able to provide a stellar network experience.

If in the next 5-10 years, the half of the world that isn’t on the Internet joins the Internet, we can’t rely solely on our peering and transit providers to get those users to the SoftLayer network, so we will need to bring the SoftLayer network closer to them:

This map gives you an idea of what the first steps of SoftLayer’s international expansion will look like. As you’ve probably heard, we will have a data center location in Singapore and in Amsterdam by the end of the year, and those locations will be instrumental in helping us build our global network.

Each of the points of presence we add in Asia and Europe effectively wrap our 40ms ring around millions of users that may have previously relied on several hops on several providers to get to the SoftLayer network, and as a result, we’re able to power a faster and more consistent network experience for those users. As SoftLayer grows, our goal is to maintain the quality of service our customers expect while we extend the availability of that service quality to users around the globe.

If you’re not within 40ms of our network yet, don’t worry … We’re globalizing, and we’ll be in your neighborhood soon.

-@gkdog

One of my favorite sites is highscalability.com. As someone with an engineering background, reading about the ways other people solve a variety of problems is really quite interesting.

A recent article talks about the impact of latency on web site viewers. It sounds like common sense that the slower a site is, the more viewers you lose, but what is amazing is that even a latency measured in milliseconds can cost a web site viewers.

The article focuses mainly on application specific solutions to latency, and briefly mentions how to deliver static content like images, videos, documents, etc. There are a couple ways to solve the static content delivery problem such as making your web server as efficient as you can. But that can only help so much. Physics – the speed of light – starts to be your enemy. If you are truly worried about shaving milliseconds off your content delivery time, you have to get your content closer to your viewers.

You can do this yourself by getting servers in datacenters in multiple sites in different geographic locations. This isn’t the easiest solution for everyone but does have its advantages such as keeping you in absolute control of your content. The much easier option is to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

CDNs are getting more popular and the price is dropping rapidly. Akamai isn’t the only game in town anymore and you don’t have to pay dollars per GB of traffic or sign a contract with a large commit for a multi-year time frame. CDN traffic costs can be very competitive costing only a few pennies more per Gb compared with traffic costs from a shared or dedicated server. Plus, CDNs optimize their servers for delivering content quickly.

Just to throw some math into the discussion let’s see how long it would take an electron to go from New York to San Francisco (4,125,910 meters / 299,792,458 meters per second = 13.7 milliseconds). 13.7 millisconds one way, now double that for the request to go there and the response to return. Now we are up to 27.4 milliseconds. And that is assuming a straight shot with no routers slowing things down. Let’s look at Melbourne to London. (16,891,360 meters / 299,792,458 meters per second = 56.3 milliseconds). Now double that, throw in some router overhead and you can see that the delays are starting to be noticeable.

The moral of the story is that for most everybody, distributing static content geographically using a CDN is the right thing to do. That problem has been solved. The harder problem is how to get your application running as efficiently as possible. I’ll leave that topic for another time.

-@nday91