Social Platform Proximity

Oct 17, 2007 – 08:30 by Ryan

Proximity is everything. If you’re a media technology startup and you’re looking for investment, NYC is the place to be.

The same logic holds true for social platform applications. From a technical standpoint, the anatomy of a Facebook platform request is:

1. User makes a web request to Facebook
2. Facebook inspects the request and then issues a proxy request to your servers
3. Your application processes the request and sends the response back to the Facebook servers
4. The Facebook servers process your response and displays the page to the user
5. The user interacts with your application and the cycle is repeated

OK, now that we have the two second web service tutorial out of the way we can discuss the importance to social application service providers.

If your application servers are located in New York and the Facebook servers are located in California you’re adding additional latency to your page load times.

If we were cruising along perfectly at the speed of light we would see an additional 13 milliseconds of latency for each packet coming and going. Round trip that would be about 26 milliseconds per packet. In reality, when moving on the same ISP backbone (Level 3) we see roughly 35 milliseconds latency per packet or ~70 milliseconds round trip.

Our basic testing indicates that our applications which are hosted on servers in NYC have about a 200 millisecond network tax per page. This isn’t terrible but the geographic distance and network diversity also increases the likelihood of a dropped packet, which would kill your page load time. If you’re not concerned about slow page loads in your Facebook application, you should be. Facebook will timeout the request from their servers to yours if you take too long. The result is an ugly error page.

How is this problem solved?

Social Platforms need to be geographically distributed. Facebook has enlisted the help of Akamai but that doesn’t solve the problem that all their proxy requests are coming from the same location (California).

Google should be well positioned because they already have a massively distributed system. Something only the Googlers know is if their system is capable of handling the frequent social application changes? A basic way of looking at this is to ask how long it will take for the changes in my profile to be seen by users around the world.

How is this problem solved (today)?

Move your servers to California and make sure they’re sitting in a Level 3 data center. You’ll be in close proximity to LinkedIn, Facebook, hi5 and MySpace.

If you work in marketing at Level 3 you can make the check payable to Deft Labs Inc.