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Cloudflare TTFB (latency) not good for Asia
Note: continue reading if you're CF Free and Pro user.
My website hosted on Singapore, previously using cloudflare the TTFB (latency) is average 40ms (not ping) now jumped 20x time slower or 800ms. it is because CF serve my user from San Jose, US not Singapore, they staff telling me that Singapore location considered as "Premium" location that available for business and enterprise user and not always available for Free and Pro user.
To know which Cloudflare data center served open
http://yourdomain/cdn-cgi/trace
replace yourdomain above and look for line starting with colo=
usually free of pro user will get colo=SJC which mean served from San Jose, CA, United States
for other location code visit
https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
Comments
You can dig deeper for more details as well by logging your cloudflare requests on your end. I do this via custom Nginx logging to see which CF datacenter's ITA codes make up my traffic https://community.centminmod.com/threads/cloudflare-custom-nginx-logging.14790/
example from my nginx origin backend logs a breakdown of where visitor requests hit CF datacenter wise
But yes bandwidth costs around the world dictate where CF routes traffic https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/
For instance, I am Telstra Cable internet user and use Australia IP based VPNs and my Cloudflare free, pro and business plans and other folks free, pro plan sites, for me hit CF Australian POPs. However, some Australians don't get their traffic routed to CF Australian POPs all the time. I guess it's dynamic and changing over time.
It happens in South Korea too. Almost all connection routes to LAX, and if you want your site to be colo'd in ICN (Incheon), you need to pay them $5k a month. I don't blame them though cuz South Korean bandwidth is expensive as hell. The good part is since most websites use CF, our ISP peering to the US has gotten better now.
My domain, which servers hosted in malaysia and singapore, and cloudflare decides to serves users in Malaysia from South Korea Cloudflare Network......... I got no words....
Cloudflare isn’t going to speed up TTFB if your main page isn’t cached (I could be wrong on this). Cloudflare is actually going to add a bit of overhead to TTFB as it fetches the main page from your origin server.
What’s really going to matter is the overall load time of your site, which should be greatly improved through appropriate use of Cloudflare.
What the heck? Koreans never get connected to the ICN edge. They always whine about network price (that is legitimate though) and ask website owners to pay 5k..
Hi sanvit, is there any Korean VPS provider that you recommend?
Cloudflare frequently adds more TTFB on all free plans.
Time to the first byte usually require some resources on the node from where it will be delivered. I think they have some kind of overloaded nodes which doing their job, but not doing it well (and who will complain about it on the free plan? I think nobody).
I did test CF and without CF TTFB on very small hobby website.
Without CF my TTFB in 5-6x times less than with CF (January 2019 from Poland datacenter)
If your not from Korea, your only hope will be somagu or amazon lightsail (of course there is azure and gcp is comming in 2020 but that would be out of most people's budget range). All other local providers requires a domestic credit/debit card (plus, aws gives you the most bandwidth per price).
That's surprising. I'm hosted in U.S. (West coast) and few of my domains hosted in Atlanta, I receive 30% traffic from India and neighboring countries but still cloudflare uses London datacenter to server them (most of the time), and occasionally Singapore, when I asked why not they're using 3 locations in India, they replied it was for premium users. My sites are often loaded from Singapore location. I'm on free plan, but they never said Singapore is for paid users!
Edit: my TTFB is in range for 260ms to 380ms for 5 tests I carried from India and Pakistan. I'm using HTTP2 push (server-side) and caching homepage (cache everything) on CF for 1 week.
@ewwink Also when I contacted them about why sites are served from various locations even if requested from single city, they told that it depends upon user's (your site visitor) ISP. If they have peering with visitor ISP the requests are severed from nearest location (HongKong, Singapore for India) and if there is no peering, then it is served from London, Marseille (FR) location for free users!
TTFB also depends on which ISP your site visitor is using
Usually asian BW is exoensive as hell. They are a company and not a charity, thus they have to make money out of the service. You should consider upgrading or using another service (or not use anything in front at all) if TTFB is the most imoirtant thing.
This is not surprising at all. Most traffic for India, Pakistan and similar region is routed over sea cable and either terminate in London or Singapore (Singtel) in most cases. So it would make sense, to save money (e.g. free plans), to offer the closest bulk-transit pop which will be on the other side of that cable in either London or Singapore. Singapore traffic tends to cost more, so more often than not, all your traffic is going via London anyways as ISPs generally route over lowest cost route, especially outside of peak hours.
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
Payment method is not a problem for me. I just want to know what options I have. Could you please name a few trustworthy local providers other than the two mentioned above? By far I know cafe24 and navercloud.
@ewwink in one old thread someone had suggested me to use bunnycdn for serving css/js/images from their Singapore location. This way you can improve the TTFB by 100 to 200 ms. (Just disable orange cloud on that particular subdomain)
NaverCloud (Ncloud) is pretty expensive (is priced similar to azure,aws,gcp). If that's an option, look at uCloud (KT), TOAST cloud (NHN ent. - same mother compwny of NAVER).
Other options similar to cafe24's price range could be iwinv/cloudv (has good peering to china), php-school (phps.kr), etc.
That's all I can think of for now
Thank you! It's very helpful.
Sigh, for my free plan domain, traffic from Hong Kong have been routed to Singapore or Osaka since January this year, the page speed have since surged according to Google Analytics...
Experineced it but it helps with other factors like ranking...
some of my domain got
SJCsomeSINall free userSituation around ICH edge is hyper-strange.
As they only peered with KNIX and non-korean ISPs, and korean ISPs hate KNIX like hell(they preper to route around US then use it) so only non-korean traffics will route to ICH
Assuming you meant ICN (Incheon Airport), that is not correct. They are peered with KINX, and KINX is peered with most major ISPs in South Korea. If you get colo'd in the ICN edge, you will be directly conntected to it and not routed to the U.S. In most cases the reason you get routed to the U.S. is because some hosts that peer through KINX (they are also an IX) only peers with HE which is obviously not a Korean ISP.
Edit : also some korean websites pay thousands of dollars to get colo'd in ICN (I personally saw a website owner paying $5k just to get colo'd in ICN)
for static files CF has no problem it serving from nearest location but not for html or dynamic page.
Yes I know but Pro user is not free. People use CDN because they think will speed up the website but in reality CF make it slower, they should make clear comparison page of what will user get for each plan.
I noticed that for my site that is on the pro plan for years, more and more locations have disappeared over time.
For example Düsseldorf was always the location with the best latency here, but I always get routed through Frankfurt now.
Also Amsterdam would be faster than Frankfurt and the backend is located there.
I believe the backend location doesn't matter since CF IPs are anycasted, thus your client is routed to wherever that has the minimal hop from them?
My VPS is located around the world.. And usually I got less than 50 ms for traceroute from Indonesia (going to CF Singapore). Recently all of my cloudflare site become 200 ms as the traceroute going to CF in San Jose..
I got various results, SIN, NRT, AMS & SJC. All free.
I wonder how will this be for Argo users. Anyone have tried it? Maybe if you pay for Argo, you can get the nearest edge... maybe.
Chinese users have been desperate
No, Argo does not affect this at all.
Experiencing the same issue. Is it worth it to pay for Cloudflare Pro? Or can you guys suggest a better DNS service?
Singapore (Asia in general) is very expensive. For example the bandwidth rates we get for SGP are over 5 times the rates in the US. I would expect that free users get very little Asian bandwidth.
SGP is not even the worst, we have been investigating South Korea recently, and our costs there are even more expensive (~10%).