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Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

Yes its called GGC. https://peering.google.com/#/

We got ours delivered about 6 months ago. It usually works fine but once in a while google services will act up, but most of the time the issue is at ISP end because even the GGC nodes needs BW to pull non-cached content, but if your ISP is overselling BW it will really hamper the performance on the GGC nodes. The GGC nodes themselves have capacity limitation, our 3 nodes has a total capacity of 19gbps, I am guessing if we were to saturate that throughput then the services will be affected.

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That's interesting, mind expanding on your problems?

I know that as a BT (uk) ISP customer mostly I can ping google.com and it returns in 6ms from a BT IP, which would indicate they're using GGC. Sometimes it resolves to a Google IP in 12 ms.

Last month however it started resolving all the way to Amsterdam and subsequently to the US with a corresponding increase in ping time. Was this their way of saving energy by shutting down DCs, or was it a bigger problem like capacity or an outage? Either way despite the latency issues the fact it always works in a plus for their infrastructure team.

If you are using opendns you should be hitting gcc usually.

I am sorry I cant get in to specifics. But Routing for GGC is controlled by Google, it is not out of ordinary for your google traffic to not come directly from the GGC node of you ISP. Any internal routing change by your ISP might also cause your Google traffic not coming from your ISP GGC node.

There are too many variables its hard to tell what exactly caused your issues.

But generally speaking GGC nodes are very reliable, their support is responsive and knows what they are doing very well and most importantly it saves us insane amount of money (cause BW is expensive here), and our users are getting better service.

Are you able to disclose if it caches/proxies YouTube?

Yes of course, the main traffic is youtube bw, which I think its 95% of the total traffic going through ggc nodes. But the don't have a breakdown of their traffic on GGC dashboard. We know it because we know our traffic before we had GGC and after we had GGC.

You might still get content from closer to home, because YouTube might redirect the heavy HTTP request back to an edge node. (Check the source of the actual many megabyte response.)

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google, and I'm oncall for this service.)

The reasons why this happens are complex and difficult to debug. Please contact your ISP and ask them to pass the details of the problem on to us.

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