Physics, Not Code, Sets the Latency Floor: Tokyo RTT Tests Prove It
A developer measuring round-trip times from Tokyo to AWS regions worldwide found latency ranging from 5ms locally to 373ms for Cape Town — a 70x spread driven purely by physical distance. The 166ms round trip to the US East Coast alone consumed 55–92% of the 180–300ms translation deadline budget, making remote servers unable to meet timing requirements regardless of model speed. Unlike queuing delays or generation time, geographic latency cannot be reduced through code optimization, quantization, or faster hardware. The single most impactful improvement was relocating the inference server from the US to Tokyo, which eliminated roughly 160ms — more than any software or model optimization achieved. The key takeaway is that for latency-sensitive applications, server placement is a more powerful lever than performance tuning.
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