How to Think About Latency When Deploying a Speedify Self-Hosted Server

Get a Speedify Self-Hosted Server to Minimize Latency

Deploying a Speedify Self-Hosted Server well, where you choose your own server hosting, requires thinking about three things in sequence:

• where to put it (geography and network topology),
• how to size it (CPU for throughput, bandwidth for capacity), and
• how to validate it (measure latency before and after, establish a baseline, monitor over time).

In this article we’ll look at these 3 things and how to get the best internet upload and download speeds when using your Speedify Self-Hosted Server.

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Why Speedify Self-Hosted Server’s Location Affects Bonding Performance

Speedify’s bonding technology works by splitting packets across multiple internet connections and reassembling them at the Speedify Self-Hosted Server. For this to work, the Speedify Self-Hosted Server has to receive packets from all the connections, put them in order, and forward the reassembled data to its destination.

Data packets from different internet connections arrive at different times. Some internet connections are faster, some are slower, and that varies moment to moment. The Speedify Self-Hosted Server has to hold data packets from the faster connections briefly while waiting for data packets from slower internet connections. Otherwise it would just discard the advantage of the slower internet connection entirely.

This waiting window is related to latency. Higher latency between client and Speedify Self-Hosted Server means more variation in arrival times, which means the server has to buffer more aggressively to compensate. The result is higher end-to-end latency for your internet connections and, in some configurations, slower internet upload and download speeds.

Where to Deploy Your Speedify Self-Hosted Servers

Place your Speedify Self-Hosted Server as close as possible, in network terms, to where your Speedify clients are. “Close” here means round-trip latency, not physical distance. A Speedify Self-Hosted Server in the same city connected via a direct fiber path is “closer” than a Speedify Self-Hosted Server in the same building connected through a congested network.

For most business deployments, this means:

• If your Speedify clients are in a single office or campus, a server in the same building or in a nearby data center is ideal
• If Speedify clients are distributed across a region, a cloud instance in the nearest data center region typically works well
• If Speedify clients are spread across multiple continents, consider whether a single Speedify Self-Hosted Server or multiple Speedify Self-Hosted Servers (possibly combined with Speedify’s existing server network) better serves your users.

How to Measure the Speedify Difference

Before deploying the Speedify Self-Hosted Server, measure the round-trip latency from your planned client locations to your planned server location. Ping is a reasonable proxy. If you’re seeing 20ms or less to your server location from most clients, you’re in a good position. Latency above 80-100ms from client to server will begin to affect the effectiveness of bonding, particularly for latency-sensitive applications.

After deployment, compare the same metrics with an actual Speedify internet connection. The difference between your raw latency to the server and the latency you see on Speedify internet connections reflects the overhead of the bonding process. For well-configured deployments, that overhead should be small.

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Speedify Self-Hosted Server: Hardware and Throughput

The Speedify Self-Hosted Server’s bonding performance is CPU-bound. Speedify’s data packet processing runs on CPU cores, so more cores generally means higher throughput ceiling.

Practical estimates:

• A 2-core VM handles light usage and testing adequately
• A 4-core VM supports moderate traffic for a small team
• 8+ cores are appropriate for higher-throughput deployments or multiple concurrent client connections with high aggregate bandwidth

Memory requirements are relatively modest: the Speedify Self-Hosted Server doesn’t need to buffer large amounts of data. It’s generally better to invest in CPU over RAM when specifying server hardware.

Internet Connection Count on the Speedify Self-Hosted Server Side

A Speedify self-hosted server should have a single, reliable, low-latency uplink connection. The bonding on the Speedify Self-Hosted Server side is not about aggregating server-side connections: that’s what the client does. The Speedify Self-Hosted Server needs enough internet upload and download speed to handle the combined output of all Speedify clients, but a single reliable internet connection is preferable to multiple internet connections on the server end.

If you’re running a Speedify Dedicated Server for a team of field workers who each have combined internet upload and download speeds of 50 Mbps, and you have ten such workers connected simultaneously, your Speedify Self-Hosted Server needs approximately 500 Mbps of upload capacity.