Reducing Latency

[browe-tfx]

Hi all,

I was wondering if there were any specific ways to reduce latency between a Chicago office and a London office. I have a ASA 5520 that I will be putting within the next week or two. What I plan on doing is setting up a site to site tunnel and I want to know is there any way to reduce latency between the two offices?

[vmiller]

can you establish a no load round trip latency baseline ?

With that distance there is bound to be a fair amount.

What apps will be running ?

Are your workstations tuned for max tcp window size?

there "may" be a play for WAAS.

[browe-tfx]

I am expecting there to be a large amount of latency, but I just wanted to see how I could reduce it even if its marginal, I've even considered using OSPF, but I don't know if that will do any good.

The application that will be running is a trading application, I've done some TCP tuning on some of the servers over there for future prepartion.

I was thinking of trying to convince the partners to allow me to use something like WAAS or SilverPeak since I am more familar with that.

[hobbe]

Hi

I read it out as you will be using the Internet as a medium for the vpn tunnel.

Since you are talking about trading and trading applications.

You "buy" special low latency links, then you add accelerators.

then you add hardware to measure the latency between sites.

then you start to go to town on the equipment to test what works best.

Quite expensive.

The Internet is far to slow and unreliable latency wise.

what works one day slows it down the next.

Good luck

HTH

[vmiller]

Having supported trading desks in the past, the idea of using the internet as transport would never be considered for all the reasons stated above.

[Kishore Chennupati]

Hi Brandon,

Internet traffic is best effort and even if there issues in your ISP and they fix it , there might be international congestion etc on your upstream links. So, expecting any kind of lowlatency behaviour is only being optimistic. You can rely on the SLA's that you have with your ISP. but beyond that is not in your control. iam sure you know what i mean.

So, the only thing that you can do to sort of enhance the performance on your end is to buy HW that has onboard encryption. Use the right MTU settings., check the CPU etc so that the packets are not being dropped etc., use QoS where necessary This is the least that you could do from your end to avoid any unwanted latency.

HTH

Kishore