I have a website that’s proxied through Cloudflare. Everything worked fine until Monday when we started noticing high latencies from 10 to 20 seconds for some of the requests. Even the same page can be fast on first visit, then slow when refreshed. I’d say about 1 in 5 requests is slow regardless of page, and regardless of user location - we checked from 5 different countries on 3 different continents.
On Tuesday we noticed everything worked fine if we accessed the server directly (via its own domain allocated by the provider), so we disabled proxy mode. We also noticed on the status dashboard that there was some maintenance going on so we thought it was a temporary issue. Today I tried re-enabling proxy mode (we need e.g. the WAF to work) and are experiencing similar latencies as before.
I’m attaching an image which includes timings for a slow (top) and a fast request (bottom).
Is there anything going on at Cloudflare? Are there any settings I should check?
Thanks for the response @crowdclass Yes, we’re in the free tier. We started evaluating Cloudflare back in October and have been using some firewall features ever since. We are discussing internally about upgrading to a paid plan, but this situation is discouraging.
Are you implying Cloudflare adds the latency deliberately to force people into upgrading? Is that written anywhere - maybe in the ToS that I didn’t read? What are the guarantees that this doesn’t happen to paying customers? What are the guarantees that the strategy isn’t used to force customers into upgrading from Pro to Business, to Enterprise?
We are facing the same issues and we are on the Business plan. We also contacted support but we are not getting any replies for days already. We disabled CF proxy and are managing our own SSL certs for now.
@johan22@ricardo31 With respect to my comment at Latency and proxy mode - #4 by alexei3 yesterday I considered that Cloudflare might re-route traffic to non-paying accounts when their nodes are experiencing heavier load. That might make sense, and it would only be fair to prioritise traffic for paying customers. Now that you’re saying the same thing happens on the business plan as well, that changes things. Thanks for sharing from your experience, I think it’s valuable information. On another note, are you suggesting not even the business plans have access to some form of support other than this community forum?
Higher Cloudflare plans do have higher priority traffic in the event of congestion or outage, and there are some ISPs that want to charge Cloudflare for peering so those ISPs (DTAG, some India ones, etc) end up routing unpaid traffic (free or lower plans) via longer/worse/tromboning routes, but Cloudflare does not degrade users to encourage them to use paid plans.
Multiples of 10s delays usually indicate a problem where something is timing out before trying an alternative, occasionally that may be a device in a Cloudflare PoP or a route from that PoP to the origin. Some details such as the PoP you are using (shown by the ‘colo’ line in https://exmaple.com/cdn-cgi/trace), your site, etc, would help to see what’s going on.
