loganmc10

AWS Global Accelerator support

Added 2020-10-12 20:33:53 +0000 UTC

Though I don't have the funding for it yet, I've decided to enable AWS Global Accelerator (https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/) for the netplay servers.

This service will reduce latency and jitter (latency spikes) for all 3 (US West, US East, Europe) servers.

To explain how this service works: Imagine you have 2 players, one in Chicago, and one in Florida. They are playing on the US East server, located in Virginia. Normally all the traffic would traverse the public Internet, which is a "best effort/good luck" network. Your packets might be dropped along the way because of congestion, or might arrive late.

With AWS Global Accelerator, the packets are delivered to AWS Edge Locations, and from there, they traverse the private AWS network to the data center. This means that the Chicago user sends their packet to the AWS Edge Location in Chicago, and from there AWS transmits it to Virginia over their private fiber network. This network has latency and bandwidth guarantees.

This means that the latency can actually be lower than p2p, since most ISP networks aren't designed and optimized for p2p traffic (house to house), they are designed to send traffic to data centers/publicly hosted services.

So give it a try! Nothing changes from the user perspective, this is a backend change, but it should result in lower latency and a smoother experience overall.