I am looking into a problem with some images hosted in the US, that some users get really slow load times. This image for example; http://opencirrus-g0805.hpl.hp.com/books40/UMICH/2160/10/47/23/59/216010472359/SCALE/sp3031.jpg
From the US datacentre using apache bench ab;
Server Hostname: opencirrus-g0805.hpl.hp.com
Document Path: /books36/IA/2160/40/00/01/15/216040000115/SCALE/sp0831.jpg
Document Length: 62604 bytes
Failed requests: 0
Requests per second: 1666.38 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 6.001 [ms] (mean)
Transfer rate: 102405.91 [Kbytes/sec] received
from another box in the dc;
Requests per second: 1847.39 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 5.413 [ms] (mean)
Transfer rate: 113526.09 [Kbytes/sec] received
From missouri
Requests per second: 27.88 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 358.700 [ms] (mean)
Transfer rate: 1774.29 [Kbytes/sec] received
ping from missouri
PING opencirrus-g0805.hpl.hp.com (198.55.33.68) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from opencirrus-g0805.hpl.hp.com (198.55.33.68): icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=55.9 ms
From London they are getting very slow
Requests per second: 5.29 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1891.408 [ms] (mean)
Transfer rate: 358.92 [Kbytes/sec] received
even though ping is much less than the time per request;
PING opencirrus-g0805.hpl.hp.com (198.55.33.68) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from opencirrus-g0805.hpl.hp.com (198.55.33.68): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=177 ms
So for users in London its taking over a second to download a 62K file, and for users about in the US its taking ~650ms
Is that to be expected, and what can I do to speed things up? (as it appears that locally the web-server is able to serve the files very fast to boxes on the LAN - I am not sure what can be done on the web server side)