The Perl and Raku Conference 2023 in Toronto

Our Raku & Perl code usually depends on the internet, but how our traffic crosses the internet can be less-than-optimal. This talk will take you on a journey across the internet, showing you why your traffic doesn’t flow across the internet the way you expect. No network engineering background required!

We will follow some surprising, but real-world traffic patterns across the internet. Why do my traceroutes to a root DNS server go across oceans, when that instance exists in my own country – and why is that the correct decision by the intermediate networks? Why does traceroute lie to us about where our delay is? How can we infer business relationships between networks, with a little understanding of how networks are connected, and how do those business relationships translate into network problems for our applications? Rather than focusing merely on protocols and bits-on-the-wire, we will take a higher view of how technology and business interact in ways that make your application slow. This talk is designed to be accessible and useful to both beginners (I promise you won’t need to know a lot about networking!) and people who have connected applications to the internet for decades.