[Rant] Github needs to fix their connections to Japan

In particular downloading release files.

Trying to install Electron it can often take > 10 minutes

That picture is after it said > 600 seconds and I thought to take a screenshot.

It's not just at my home. I've seen this issue all over Japan on different machines over the last several years. I have even seen it using the free wifi at the Tokyo Amazon co-working space in the Amazon Tokyo headquarters (github release files are served from AWS!)

When I bring it up with github they brush me off as "not our problem" but clearly it is their problem.

I have a fast connection. I'm using NTT (the AT&T of Japan) with a 1gig fiber optic connection and So-Net (Sony's internet service). I can download games from Steam for example in quick. For example I just picked to install GTA5 in steam.

You can see above it's going at 37.1 MB/s. Electron is only 72meg. If things were working correctly it should only take a few seconds, not > 10 minutes to download

It's not just Steam. Most services are fast. Fast.com(netflix) reported 300Mbps last night. Right now it's at 160Mbps.

Google's speedtest reports 198.27Mbps

Google's Fiber test shows 30Mbps down, 199Mbps up from Tokyo to Los Angeles

I'm bringing this here because it's a github related issue and github is a cornerstone of software development. The nice people staffed at github seem to be customer service reps reading from a customer service database instead of considering their impact on the devs around the world. It would be great if someone with the power to make stuff happen at github (or Microsoft) would give this issue more consideration.

Ideally if they are going to be a backbone of development they need to mirror the files across the world instead of only serving from Seattle AWS (which is apparently what they are doing)

Github claims github pages are served by a "global content delivery network". Can that same network be used to speed up release files? Here's crossing my fingers. 🤞