Second Life™ data centers are located in Phoenix and Dallas according to Maestro Linden. He is not sure but thinks there is another in DC. A few months ago the Lab was consolidating from three data centers to two. So, it is probably two, but one never knows.
When asked, Maestro confirmed there is no data center in San Francisco.
If you geo-locate the region IP addresses (site) you can get from the viewer’s Help-About…, you will probably find the addresses are in other locations. For me most regions appear to be served from San Francisco. I suspect that if you are on the east coast of the USA you’ll find them in a different city, but I’m not sure. Let me know if you check it.
I’m about 460 miles from San Francisco and about 300 miles from Phoenix. So, one would think that I would connect to the closer servers in Phoenix. But, network traffic routes through the major backbones and data centers. Traffic leaving Southern California generally travels up to Los Angles (LA). For me to connect to a site in Cambridge, Mass. (173.223.104.110) my connection is through LA and up to Montréal, Canada and eventually to Cambridge. Not the most direct route for surface travel. The point being map distance is not the same as network distance.
