Greetings,
Physical distance is not always the case...
You should also be aware that best is usually proportional to your physical distance from that IRC server. Many servers tend to only serve people within a certain proximity of that server.
:
Your best bet is to use
TRACERT <ip address of the chat server>[/b] from the Windows command line. (You can open that by going to the Start Menu, selecting Run... and entering "CMD" or "CMD.EXE".) Although servers may be near you physically, your path to them by way of the Internet may be routed across the USA and back.
TRACERT is a nice little built-in command utility that lets you trace routes (hence the name) through and to networks. When you use this command, you'll receive replies in milliseconds and also the amount of hops. Mostly, you will want to pay attention to how many hops your connection has to make before it reaches its destination. The fewer hops, the better. Most ISPs that have several backbone connections will logically use what we like to call the "open shortest path first" (OSPF) method, but that's not always the case.
Regards,
John
