Servers now have direct Gigabit Internet links

We’ve finished upgrading our network so that all of our customer Web hosting and mail servers have full, direct gigabit links to Internet peering points, with no 100 megabit Ethernet segments anywhere. This involved replacing old Ethernet switches and retiring old servers, and now we’re more than ready for the future.

Many other companies still run their servers on slower 100 Mbps Ethernet connections, leading to slow speeds for all sites on a busy server that experiences a sudden burst of traffic. We don’t have that limitation, which is why we can now allow individual sites to “burst” up to 100 Mbps without affecting other sites on the same server.

Of course, good network performance means more than just raw throughput — low latency (“ping time”) is also important.

If you think of a network as being like a road, “throughput” is [sort of] the measure of how many cars the road can handle per second, and “latency” is [sort of] the time it takes an individual car to get from one end of the road to another. It’s no good having a wide, gridlocked road that can handle lots of cars at 5 miles an hour, and it’s no good having a road that allows only a small handful of fast-moving cars.

Our network has both high throughput and low latency. For example, I just transferred a large file from kernel.org to one of our hosting servers at over 180 Mbps, and a quick ping test shows our latency to www.yahoo.com and www.google.com is under 3 ms:

$ ping -n -c 3 www.yahoo.com
PING www-real.wa1.b.yahoo.com (209.131.36.158) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 209.131.36.158: icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=1.71 ms
64 bytes from 209.131.36.158: icmp_seq=2 ttl=59 time=1.69 ms
64 bytes from 209.131.36.158: icmp_seq=3 ttl=59 time=1.80 ms

$ ping -n -c 3 www.google.com
PING www.l.google.com (74.125.19.105) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 74.125.19.105: icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=2.22 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.19.105: icmp_seq=2 ttl=59 time=1.80 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.19.105: icmp_seq=3 ttl=59 time=1.91 ms


By the way, if you try your own speed tests (or try ours), be sure to notice if they’re measuring the speed in megabits per second (Mbps), megabytes per second (MBps), kilobits per second (Kbps), or kilobytes per second (KBps).

Those are easy to mix up, and we sometimes hear complaints like “My Internet connection is supposed to be 1500 Kbps (1.5 Mbps), but my FTP program says I’m only getting 187 KBps.” Those are all the same speeds, just measured in different units.