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Any experiences with Cloudflare's Argo Smart Routing?
We've had several reports at work about performance issues that we couldn't reproduce and also no metrics in our extensive monitoring shows evidence of some widespread performance issues, so I thought it could be some routing issues from some locations, and today I turned on Argo Smart Routing in Cloudflare to give it a try.
They claim much improved routing (average 30% improvements), fewer connection issues etc.
Does anyone here have experience with it and can share their experience with it?
Comments
Yes, I've experienced increased inbound bandwidth from Cloudflare (reaching about 200Mbps from their data center to Hetzner), which is relatively high for a CDN.
I have used their argo smart routing for a month. Unfortunately it doesn't worth the bill. it can reduces uncached request origin latency. But for both cached and uncached request you'll be charged and there will be no benefits at all for cached request cause they're already available in edge (near to your visitors). Yes it will improve your site performance slightly. But think about the latency, if your dc and cloudflare dc (based on user location) is at same location you'll get no benefits out of it. But if your user request contents from different country or continent you'll get benefits of it for the first request (after that cloudflare will cached your content to edge). So in short not worth the bill in our case. But it completely depends on the site and its caching behavior and visitors location. Moreover be careful about the bandwidth usage. Cause it charges a lot for high traffic sites.
It doesn't make sense to me.
It basically saying we will do cold potato routing from ingest/edge/eyeball network location to a network location nearest your origin server. On the non-argo they are claiming to do hot potato routing, i.e. offload from edge to transit immediately. The thing is that unless you have Enterprise account you can't do an internal traceroute, so you just don't know, and I suspect in a lot of cases they keep traffic on their own network anyway when ingestion and edge sit at different points, it doesn't make sense when you consider the effective cost of transit.
If it costs you $5 to buy a warm fuzzy feeling fine but I wouldn't expect any significant improvement. I suspect it will removed soon.
FWIW, though, GCP has two tiers too that is basically mirrors the argo / non-argo so perhaps I'm wrong on some of the economics https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers
One other things from my notes, is that WARP for Teams (free upto 50 users) apparently uses cold potato routing, i.e. you stay on the cloudflare network to a location near your origin, if you wanted to do some testing, this could be a plausible way in the absence of internal traceroutes
I have been using Cloudflare Argo routing for a few years now and main improvement is for TTFB which can range between 25-75% improved performance - depending on your visitor's geographic distance to your origin servers. Further away your visitors, then better the Argo routing performance improvements. You can query Cloudflare API for per Cloudflare Datacenter Argo routing metrics and script your own 48hrs Argo reports to see a detailed breakdown of Argo metrics for each Cloudflare Datacenter.
Works out well for me as my visitor makeup is 55% North American and rest split evenly between Europe and Asia.
Note, AFAIK Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance partner Web hosts https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/bandwidth-alliance/ which offer free bandwidth egress to Cloudflare on non-Enterprise Cloudflare plans will take priority for routing over Argo routing. So it won't be as optimized for all routes compared to non Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance partner Web hosts. Cloudflare Enterprise plans though will prioritized Argo routing.
Not Cloudflare Argo, but I had great results with Cloudfront with Origin Shield. Just put your origin shield close to the real origin, and network between the origin shield and cloudfront edge will go through AWS's private networking lines. Pricing should be similar to Argo with US/EU traffic, but a bit more expensive on APAC regions. However, bear in mind that even with Argo, APAC regions such as South Korea will still not be able to use local datacenters, while Cloudfront can. You also get 1TB/mo free for life, so that could cover most of your traffic depending on your requirement.
Some transit providers may offer better routes however they are likely more expensive.
My ISP is a good example, they just get rid of traffic dirt cheap.
When I use my route optimizer network, I can cut my latency to some destinations by up to 50%.
Some servers come at a premium because they have better transit providers.
Pays of these days, SG is nearly toast and I still got 175ms from Europe.
What does that imply? Can you clarify?
For us it's an API, all dynamic content, and traffic from around the world. We are already seeing an improvement btw!
We do see an improvement already but we'll be monitoring this closely to see if it's consistent.
Much of our traffic also comes from the US. Fingers crossed
We are in GCP, and already use Cloudflare for a lot of stuff.
Doesnt do much in Europe if your server is in Europe.
Does quite a lot if your visitors are coming from another continent to Europe.
Cache Reserve + Argo routing ONLY for API is very cheap and scalable way to get your app running fast globally.
It replaces (and can outperform) traditional multicontinent server load balancing routed by GeoIP. If your data is heavily cacheable you can additionally setup Workers KV to cache things on the edge
https://dev.to/bryce/using-workers-kv-to-build-an-edge-cached-blog-23fo
CloudFlare routing to origin is generally not amazing quality. Argo improves things but it's nowhere near as good as e.g. GCP Premium tier. You really cannot beat GCP's fibre links for cross continent transit.
Also a bit of a cheat but I'm pretty sure using CF Tunnels gives you free argo. Could be wrong though.
I got this result from vnStat. Since I was using the Pro plan on Cloudflare before subscribing to Argo, the bandwidth was very limited. However, Argo allows more traffic to pass through the CDN.
Gotcha. BTW Cloudflare has been having an outage since yesterday afternoon. Must be big
Argo is showing almost 40% improvement with routing, and I think it's real, from looking at the feedback from various locations