Hmmm, not sure I fully understand. Afaik you also use instances running on Google Cloud, requests from these will surely see a way more speedy response for pages (and/or resources/assets) also hosted on the same Google network/cloud so therefore the instance location compared to sites running on complete different networks/continents? Surely this only would be milliseconds for the TTFB stats, but taking external/CDN request and other assets into account these differences might be relevant (even though certainly not the main subject/purpose of the Almanac though).
It's the difference between lab and field data. All loading performance metrics (TTFB, FCP, etc) discussed in the Almanac come from the Chrome UX Report in the field. So the physical location of the HTTP Archive lab instances is irrelevant.
Hmmm, not sure I fully understand. Afaik you also use instances running on Google Cloud, requests from these will surely see a way more speedy response for pages (and/or resources/assets) also hosted on the same Google network/cloud so therefore the instance location compared to sites running on complete different networks/continents? Surely this only would be milliseconds for the TTFB stats, but taking external/CDN request and other assets into account these differences might be relevant (even though certainly not the main subject/purpose of the Almanac though).
It's the difference between lab and field data. All loading performance metrics (TTFB, FCP, etc) discussed in the Almanac come from the Chrome UX Report in the field. So the physical location of the HTTP Archive lab instances is irrelevant.
Ah, gotcha! Thanks for the clarification