Latency Vs. Bandwidth - Part II
by admin on Jun.06, 2007, under Networking
So this is a follow-up post to Latency Vs. Bandwidth where I gave a good link to an explanation on the differences between the problem of Latency and Bandwidth on the Internet. The same blogger had a follow-up post that explained a few ways for you to help improve high latencies.
This is another good article that goes over some of the things you can do to mitigate latency problems. I am going to go through a couple of things on this topic myself:
“Tweaking the host TCP settings” was one of his things to try and I agree that if you do it right this can help a great deal but if you tweak it wrong it can make things a whole lot worse. Be sure to test it in a lab before doing anything in production. Also another FYI on this method is that Windows Vista auto tunes your network setting so you are better off just letting it make the changes unless you have major problems.
Another method that he brings up is to move mission critical Internet web pages or downloads to a CDN network. This is a great idea but be wary of the price that this can cost you. There are a lot of them out that and some are cost effective and some are not. I did a mini review of some of the choices here.
Another thing you can do that should help is if you have an application that needs to stay in your datacenter and you need to get it cross county under a maximum latency is work with your ISP. Most of the time your traffic will switch through multiple ISPs between your datacenter and theirs if it is a long distance away. This can cause major increases in your latency.
A couple of ways to mitigate this is to possibly switch your ISP to the same ISP as the business you need to work with. If it is a lower bandwidth need you could get a point to point link, or if it needs to be a higher bandwidth connection you should look at the possibility of getting a MPLS tunnel from end to end through your ISP.
One more tip which doesn’t really relate to Latency but will help if you are wondering why your transfers are so slow over a large pipe. Use parallel transfers, if you have large amounts of data to transfer over long distances either program it in or find a programs that running multiple streams at the same time. You will find a huge increase in throughput.
There are a thousand ways to look at this but hopefully between the post from the EdgeBlog and my posts you can get a lot of options.
