Hi,
I’m currenty using Oracle Free Tier for Jellyfin (hosted in Paris) and i wanted to know what is the proper way to speed up media delivery when i’m far away from the server location ? (Korea currently)
EDIT : After all your replies, my VPN through Hong Kong give me the best speed.
Peering is actually a complex issue. The ISP you’re currently using might not have a good peering with your data center operator.
One way to force a different peering is by complaining to your ISP. Include the server’s IP address in the complain, and their sysadmin might take a look and alter their routing table so traffics going to your data center will go through different route (assuming the ISP is not shitty and have multiple high quality peering AND actually looking at your support request).
Another way is by using a VPN. By using a VPN, you’ll bypass your ISP’s network routing. Your traffic will go through your VPN provider’s data center instead, which have completely different peering partners than your ISP. Try connecting to different country (e.g. Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Europe) to see which one is the fastest. For example, your ISP might have a good peering to Hong Kong, so by connecting to a Hong Kong VPN server, you’ll bypass your ISP’s shitty peering to Europe.
Finger cross though. In general, connection between this part of Asia and Europe is not great because there is no direct route. Connection to US is a lot faster in comparison because there are many direct undersea fiber optics links.
Thank you for your reply! I’ve just tested with my VPN and Hong Kong gives me the best speed. (Like 20x more)
I was expecting you’ll get like 2x improvement max. 20x is crazy lmao.
I used to oversee WAN and peering operations for a large multi site. Residential ISPs almost never respond to reports of inefficient routes unless you are one of their peers, big business customers, or you really know your stuff and send in a detailed report showing asymetric routes, bad bgp info, etc.
As far as a VPN goes, that probably wouldn’t help either. You will probably increase the number of hops and latency. Your route will still egress your isp gateway, to your VPN provider, then travel over the Internet and to your remote server, while adding additional protocol overhead. Yes, it is remotely possible that there is an improved link from his regional VPN node to his remote provider, but unlikely from my experience with traffic engineering.
Actually in my case it did help. I got faster speed to one of my VPS in Paris (OVH) if I use VPN to Singapore first. Heck, even my VPS in Singapore (also OVH) is faster too after connecting to the VPN. My ISP probably really have a bad peering with OVH.
That’s interesting. Any chance your ISP could have been qos’ing streaming video? Although Singapore would be about the one place where a VPN concentrator would help; it is pretty much the big fiber hub in that local region for East, West, North connectivity.
Fiber map
I don’t think they have QoS beyond enforcing soft data cap at 2TB. Another weird thing I notice with this ISP is how bad sites hosted behind cloudflare would perform. It usually fine, but sometimes they have random high latency on random assets (js, css or image files), and when it happens the speed to that site would tank too to just a few hundred KB/s or less. When it happens it’ll magically gone by using a VPN.
Oh man, fucking tell me about it. I remember Verizon support gave the absolute runaround when I was trying to debug why my server was absolute garbage in San Jose vs LA. Took me 3 separate support calls for them to finally do something about it. It also took me a while to figure out it was an ISP issue in the first place.