Insights about globally distributing relay nodes

Staking & Delegation Operate a Stake Pool
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Hi community,

This question might have already been asked.
I am trying to collect feedback and insights about geographically spreading relay nodes.

For example, If your BP node is in europe and you would online 3 relays. You could choose to have all 4 nodes at the same location (4 different ip addresses on 4 different machines of course). But you could also decide to have all 4 nodes on a different continent.

I would say, that would help the network spread globally and be geographically more divers. However the round-trip times (RTT) between your relays and your node would be relatively slow (i would think around 200). While having all the nodes at the same location will create very low rtt to your node. Is that a risk for block production or something else?

What are your thoughts here? Should/would you still do it? Will the disadvantages weigh more than the advantage of geographical distribution?

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Since the topology updater gives your relays randomly located peers you are better off locating your relays closer to the bp. I have both closer and remote relays, it does not hurt much.
The current assignment of peers is a bit silly in the case of a remote relay. Just imagine yout bp in europe sends data over the Atlantic ocean to a relay in america, where the relay has 40% of its peers in the topology.json in europe, so it sends it back over the Atlantic.
I’d say best keep at least one relay close to the bp.

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I had 1 BP and 3 relays
BP + 1Relay in germany, 1 Relay in USA and 1 Relay in Ro and never had issue…
As long the peopagation is under 1 second then everything should be fine…

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