Lower Latency to DigitalOcean in Frankfurt

This translation was generated automatically.

I’ve written several times about my efforts to reduce latency to the Mumble server.

DigitalOcean recently opened a new data centre in Frankfurt, with a very low-latency connection from my networks (Telekom and Kabel Deutschland Vodafone). Ping is about 15 ms over cable and a little over 20 ms on VDSL. Amsterdam and France were about 10 ms higher. That may sound minor, but conversations feel smoother. Alex in Finland adds another 30 ms, which is still within reason.

For comparison, Skype adds what feels like 200 ms over the same connections—certainly as soon as video is involved.

The advice still stands: where possible, reduce latency at capture and playback (unplug USB devices, set buffers to a minimum), and bypass the buffers in Wi-Fi chips with an Ethernet cable.

If you sign up through this link, you get $10 credit—enough for two free months on a small virtual server, billed by the minute. If you only start a virtual machine on demand and delete it afterward, that credit lasts a long time.