At the moment we're trying to decide whether to move our datacenter from the west coast to the east coast.

However, I am seeing some disturbing latency numbers from my west coast location to the east coast. Here's a sample result, retrieving a small .png logo file in Google Chrome and using the dev tools to see how long the request takes:

• West coast to east coast:
  215 ms latency, 46 ms transfer time, 261 ms total
• West coast to west coast:
  114 ms latency, 41 ms transfer time, 155 ms total

It makes sense that Corvallis, OR is geographically closer to my location in Berkeley, CA so I expect the connection to be a bit faster.. but I'm seeing an increase in latency of +100ms when I perform the same test to the NYC server. That seems .. excessive to me. Particularly since the time spent transferring the actual data only increased 10%, yet the latency increased 100%!

That feels... wrong... to me.

I found a few links here that were helpful (through Google no less!) ...

• Does routing distance affect performance significantly?
• How does geography affect network latency?
• Latency in Internet connections from Europe to USA

... but nothing authoritative.

So, is this normal? It doesn't feel normal. What is the "typical" latency I should expect when moving network packets from the east coast <--> west coast of the USA?