How I used my pinging service to figure out if I have a latency problem

Jul 10, 2024

Just the other day I found out one of my sites newsletters.love was having a bit of a slowdown.

As the site is hosted in Singapore, latency wise I couldn’t feel any issues, but it is apparently a big enough problem that someone mentioned it in a reply to my post on Hacker News

While I was disappointed that I didn’t catch this earlier, this gave me an opportunity to use Ping Everything Everywhere All At Once (PEEAAO), a tool I’ve built (and open for private beta) that distributes pings to servers around the globe.

So in order to find out how the latency is looking like for my friends in North America, I made a call to PEEAAO

curl -v -X POST https://api.peeaao.com/api/ping -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" -d target=https://app.newsletters.love -d expected_code=200 -d locations="singapore,nyc,amsterdam" | jq

{
  "type": "https",
  "target": "app.newsletters.love",
  "locations": {
    "amsterdam": [
      {
        "runner_id": "4fgacv3",
        "location": "amsterdam",
        "result_in_ms": 1045,
        "code": 200
      }
    ],
    "nyc": [
      {
        "runner_id": "4sda21a",
        "location": "nyc",
        "result_in_ms": 811,
        "code": 200
      }
    ],
    "singapore": [
      {
        "runner_id": "272af4d4",
        "location": "singapore",
        "result_in_ms": 198,
        "code": 200
      }
    ]
  },
  "errors": null,
  "status": "up"
}

Looks bad but at least now I know how bad the traffic is coming from North America.

➡️ If you’re interested in giving PEEAAO a try, just drop your email here and I’ll send you your auth token.