Linode Tokyo/Japan Speedtests

Linode which is my favorite VPS host, recently announced their service availability on Tokyo,Japan data center.  If your visitors reside in Asia you might be interested in jumping to Tokyo data center.  But what about speeds? London data center is already performing very well for Asian linode customers.

So to find out what kind of speeds that I can get with Tokyo Data Center, I have snatched a 512MB linode on Tokyo DC and decided to perform some network speedtests. All tests were done with 100MB test files.

Unfortunately the results are extremely poor as you can see below. I wont put the blames quickly on linodes part because since its new there can be few minor problems and most likely be able to resolve this by simple support ticket. But I found something interesting,

As a tradition Linode hosts their speedtest files on their 1st server of specific data center. For an example their first server on London DC is london1.linode.com and their london speedtest is located on London1.linode.com ( http://london1.linode.com/100MB-london.bin ) too.

Vice-versa Tokyo speedtest file is hosted on Tokyo1.linode.com ( http://tokyo1.linode.com/100MB-tokyo.bin ) But when I saw the Linode Manager Dashboard I saw my Tokyo Linode also resides on Tokyo1 host node

And I guess that’s the major reason I got this kinda slow speeds because since its new data center, many customers might be testing speeds by downloading that 100MB test file which is hosted on the Tokyo1 Node which my Linode resides in.

So Its not a good idea to host public speedtest files on a customer production server. Specially since linode is a big company it can be brutal for the other linode members resides on the same node.  However things can be different and Ill put this to linode staff attention and lets see what their answer is!

Anyway here are the results

1. Lets start with Cachefly 100MB test which become community standard by now

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 2.94M/s   in 35s

2011-09-25 09:25:23 (2.84 MB/s) – `100mb.test.1′ saved [104857600/104857600]

I have performed this cachefly test about 2 times and this is the best that I managed to get. Since Cachefly also got Tokyo POP, Im wondering why this test got slow

2. Linode Newark NJ

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 1.59M/s in 79s

2011-09-25 09:56:33 (1.26 MB/s) – `100MB-newark.bin’ saved [104857600/104857600]

3. Linode Fremont CA

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 2.47M/s in 38s

2011-09-25 10:05:16 (2.62 MB/s) – `100MB-fremont.bin’ saved [104857600/104857600]

4. Linode Atlanta GA

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 1.51M/s in 1m 51s

2011-09-25 10:09:44 (920 KB/s) – `100MB-atlanta.bin’ saved [104857600/104857600]

5. Linode Dallas TX

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 1.76M/s in 68s

2011-09-25 10:12:18 (1.46 MB/s) – `100MB-dallas.bin’ saved [104857600/104857600]

6. Linode London UK

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 1.15M/s in 92s

2011-09-25 10:14:42 (1.09 MB/s) – `100MB-london.bin’ saved [104857600/104857600]

7. Hetzner Germany

100%[======================================>] 104,840,234 508K/s in 3m 33s

2011-09-25 10:21:22 (482 KB/s) – `100MB.iso’ saved [104840234/104840234]

8. Serverboost Netherlands

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 366K/s in 5m 30s

2011-09-25 10:30:26 (310 KB/s) – `100mb.bin’ saved [104857600/104857600]

Now that sucks. 310KB/s I was able to max out my DSL with that same serverboost speedtest by downloading it at 460KB/s

9. OVH France

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 903K/s in 2m 23s

2011-09-25 10:34:38 (716 KB/s) – `test.bin’ saved [104857600]

10. Finally for the lulz lets try the Linode Tokyo speedtest

Linode hosts their tokyo test file here http://tokyo1.linode.com/100MB-tokyo.bin and Like I said before I found that my linode resides on Tokyo 1 too. So lets try same host speedtest to see what kind of result that we can get.

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 53.0M/s in 1.9s

2011-09-25 10:41:45 (53.0 MB/s) – `100MB-tokyo.bin.1′ saved [104857600/1048576]