Cloudflare keeps using SIN than NRT

Website, Application, Performance DNS & Network
1

After years of exeprience, I’ve found that when bypassing cache, cloudflare properly uses the closest pop/edge for website visitors especially on free plan.

Most of websites I setup including clients’, I set to bypass cache for the best performance as using cloudflare adds additional time. For example, if a visitor is in Tokyo, viewing a website hosted in Tokyo, cloudflare uses Singapore first, then access Tokyo.

But sometimes, even bypassing cache, cloudflare keeps using Singapore server than Tokyo server, and I have no idea how to tell cloudflare to always use NRT than SIN. I thought purging everything could solve, but it just keeps serving from SIN.

On the other hand, my other sites with the same setup are always served from NRT. I wonder what exactly keeps these two same configured sites act differently.

2

When you say “Bypassing Cache,” do you mean setting the DNS record to :grey:, or are you using a Page Rule for Cache Level?

As far as routing, it’s up to the ISP. Even if your sites are very similar, some ISPs route differently based upon Cloudflare IP address.

3

Via page rules. Sorry for the non detail.

For the ISP, here’s my findings from my experiments.

If page rule is set even before changing domain’s NS to cloudflare records, it uses NRT which is the closest to visitors, no matter what ISP (my home network or pingdom tool’s ISP or not) the access is from.

If cloudflare is enabled before the page rule set, cloudflare uses SIN or other than NRT (but mostly SIN).

And I’m not sure if ISPs are understanding the use of cloudflare cache status to route traffic. I’m thinking there’s something else other than ISP that decides where to route traffic.

4

That’s very weird, and is quite a revelation.

In your experiment, did you note the assigned IP addresses for your website in each case? It would be very interesting to see if they’re different.

5

I’m just pasting two cases where NRT is used and SIN is used. Accessed right now from my computer.

fl=22f233
h=***.biz
ip=121.102.151.174
ts=1578321519.887
visit_scheme=https
uag=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.88 Safari/537.36
colo=NRT
http=http/2
loc=JP
tls=TLSv1.3
sni=plaintext
warp=off

and SIN case

fl=35f421
h=***.com
ip=121.102.151.174
ts=1578321775.377
visit_scheme=https
uag=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.88 Safari/537.36
colo=SIN
http=http/2
loc=JP
tls=TLSv1.3
sni=plaintext
warp=off

Both of them have the same page rules to bypass cache. The first one is always NRT and the second one is always SIN.

6

That’s certainly odd, and the only difference I see is one is .biz and one is .com

But you don’t have a log of IP addresses before and after setting the page rule?

I suggest you open a support ticket. They might have an explanation, considering they’re the same IP address.

Login to Cloudflare and then contact Cloudflare Support by clicking on the Get More Help button.

7

Do you mean the IP address displayed within cdn-cgi/trace?

9

It would be great if you avoid hijacking a thread. I know Argo, but I don’t use it. And keep your language to English so anyone can understand.

10

The IP address in cdn-cgi/trace is your home IP address.

You said routing was dependent upon the Page Rule. I misunderstood earlier and thought both sites had the same IP address. It could just be coincidence, unless you can demonstrate a routing change due to the Page Rule.

1 Like
11

I made a support ticket #1811451.

2 Likes
12

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