Hello again all!
To reduce latency, I would like to host my Amazon EC2 instances near Roblox server locations. I remember hearing that they were in the middle of a move earlier this year, but I’ve also heard that they are switching to Linux servers although it hasn’t been done yet as the HTTP headers sent by it still say Microsoft IIS. Where are they now, or how could I find out? The list of regions available in EC2 is here.
Thanks!
Maybe you could try to constantly create (and destroy) your own instances and test the ping with the Roblox servers
I did this when trying to make a fast bot for the website-the servers were in the middle of the US iirc
If you’re using Amazon servers the odds of you ever having meaningful latency on their end is negligible. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
How much of a problem do you think latency will be? As @Dekkonot stated, it probably won’t be a problem.
And if it really is a problem, then what are you doing that requires such low latency? Using a separate server sounds like it is not the best thing to do in that situation.
Small differences are very meaningful. While I have a plan B if this isn’t quick enough, I’d like this service be quick enough to handle user input without a noticeable difference between code on my server and the Roblox server.
Implementing a protected module service. Protected modules that use this service will have to be designed for it (like a client-server model in Roblox, but with the server being my server and the client being the Roblox server). This isn’t a good solution for modules that don’t know what information they need ahead of time and would spend lots of time in back and forth requests to the Roblox server, but it is a good start. I have a more robust solution planned for the future.
I randomly checked the IPs of some servers:
Every single front page game I checked had servers in San Mateo, California. The two other servers were from games that were not empty but only had 1-2 running servers.
I think it might be possible that the location of servers is just random but when it comes to joining a server you get matched with the one with the lowest ping. The server I used to retrieve the IPs is located in California, so it would be expected that it would match with California game servers. For front page games with a lot of servers, I can get matched with a low ping server in California easily. For random games with only one or two servers, I have to join a server that already exists so it may be in some random place or be close to the location of the person who started the server. Again, just a theory, I actually have no idea.
tl;dr Who knows? Maybe random.
The locations of Roblox servers are random and are chosen based on your connection. For instance, if the server is started by a user who comes from the US, the server will be based in a location near them. Same goes for if the server is started by an EU user, this is to reduce latency as much as possible.
Something to note, Roblox use their IP ranges on several different hosting companies, which support the use of custom IP ranges. This means that the server could be based in the EU, however, is hosting a US IP address.
It’s best not to rely on the IP information to determine server location due to this. Since you’re using Amazon services, you shouldn’t need to worry about latency all too much.
I personally have experience with Roblox’s server IP’s as I’m currently working on a project to allow developers to verify if a connection is coming from a Roblox game server. More information here.
Edit: I also want to quickly note as well that Roblox have already begun the move to Linux, as the User-Agent for that is Roblox/Linux.
A bit late, but I heard of a good way to find Roblox server regions and IP addresses. Since this post gets a lot of attention still, I wanted to update it. I heard about this from Brooke @grilme99 on Twitter.
You can use the assigned ASN for Roblox. These are ranges of IP addresses given to Roblox and have regions associated with them. Check it out here:
