Hi people, in another thread there was a hint that Seafarer’s Rest was not located in Europe when you track the IP so I decided to do some investigating myself.
I’m on Piken Square[EU] and found an address with the command /ip and ran this address through http://whatismyipaddress.com which in turn gave me a location for the address.
No the servers are based in Germany. If I do a traceroute on my connection to that ip I get a round trip time of about 30ms, compared to about 120ms for one to the University of Texas, which is also in Austin. Or ~60ms for a connection to a server based in New York. 30ms to America just isn’t possible. For comparison currently a new transatlantic connection between London and New York is being set up that offers a latency of 59.6ms (a 5.2ms improvement over the old connection) at a cost of $300 million for stock traders. If ANet really had a 30ms connection to America, they could make millions off it :P .
The ip address that ANet is using is called an anycast address. A computer sends a packet to a group address, and it is then routed to the nearest node that is part of that group. It is actually pretty common for DNS services and large content delivery services.
Well to be fair 120ms isn’t all that noticable in a game like GW. And I’d be willing to bet the connections of most people (except for maybe those that live in Germany) wouldn’t get 30 ms to the server, my ISP blocks traceroute so I ran it from work, there my connection is better than 99% of my country; and yet I’m not allowed to use it for anything fun.
Plus the connection to the server is probably only the first part of the story. What I mean is, if I am routed to my closest server in Germany and my friend is routed to his closest in Texas, how do we play together?
Actually come to think of it I’d be surprised if they are really using anycast, when I think about it the whole thing is sounding more and more complicated. I’m thinking now that whatever database that whatsmyip is basing its geolocation on just isn’t correct.
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