Benchmark: how database location affects latency for far-away users

While building Bunny Database, we wanted to understand how much physical distance between users and databases actually impacts latency in practice.

When multi-region database setups are costly or clunky, devs often fall back to caching and other workarounds to hide latency from far-away users.

But the question is: how bad does it actually get as users move farther away from the database?

To find out, we measured p95 read latency across increasing distances, then repeated the same test with read replication enabled.

Turns out serving reads close to users reduced latency by up to 99%.

Full benchmark write-up here: https://bunny.net/blog/how-database-location-affects-far-away-users-benchmarking-read-latency-in-bunny-database/

How are you handling database latency for far-away users in your apps?