How to remove nodes from a path?

Question

When I traceroute some servers I notice that the path taken is not geographically ideal:

I am in the UK's South-West.

My request goes into London, then annoyingly goes North of London (to Leicester) for 2 hops and returns to London before going to Europe.

How do I get my requests to this address to take a more efficient route?

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I realise now that locating IP addresses geographically is not extremely accurate, so in fact the path may not look like this.

However, is there a way I can more directly access servers to try to decrease latency?

Answer 1

There isn't much you can do specifically that will alter the path you follow. Routing decisions are made by the network, and are a result of peering arrangements between various network providers. There are limited paths across the water, and your ISP does not have any. So your request will be routed to a backbone, and to an international link at some point.

Switching ISPs may give you a different path - but not necessarily a better one.

But take visual traceroutes with a pinch of salt. The databases that are used are not perfect. They infer the physical location of IP addresses, rather than having a definitive list. So the chances are, that geographical path is not a true reflection of the physical path followed. It is often the case that even the country location of an IP is incorrect.

When looking at optimisation, the only important thing is latency - so if there is a hop that introduces a significant mount of latency, then focus your attention on that, and open a ticket with your ISP, and cross your fingers.