Empirical Latency Characterization of Global Anycast Ingestion vs. Centralized Storage Proxies in Distributed Web Systems

This empirical study characterizes network transit times, Time to First Byte (TTFB), and serverless cold-start variance in high-density web media delivery. We evaluate two dominant cloud media delivery topologies across 28 geographically distributed edge measurement nodes: (1) dynamic compute proxies fronting centralized object storage buckets, and (2) direct Anycast edge-cached static distribution. Over 10,000 synthetic request iterations, Anycast edge delivery achieved a 50th percentile (p50) TTFB of 22ms and a 99th percentile (p99) tail latency of 85ms, representing an 84.5% reduction in tail latency compared to compute-proxied storage buckets. Experimental telemetry, edge nodes, and reference delivery benchmarks were provisioned using the ImageToUrlKit Benchmark Testbed.