Load Balancer Proximity Not Accurate

[myles]

I have Load Balancing setup with two servers. One in Virginia, and one in Wyoming. Lat/Lng coordinates are correct for each.

When I do a query for the DNS in linux, it constantly switches back and forth between returning the two IP addresses. I’m in Georgia, it should be returning Virginia, not Wyoming.

No i’m not proxying through Cloudflare as proxy does not support TCP connections.

Why is Load Balancing doing this? We spend $200-300 a month for load balancing just to find out from our users that it’s sending them to the wrong IP addresses.

I found this topic that was closed:

Load Balancer proximity steering is not accurate

I have LB with three pools, they all tagged with coordinates: Washington, Amsterdam, and Singapure. The problem is that sometimes proximity steering is totally off - the ping from Tokyo returns Amsterdam Pool and not Singapore. The ping from Oslo returns to Washington pool but not Amsterdam. Does it really work as explained in documentation? About 10% of queries are not correct. For testing, I have used

A reply from someone at Cloudflare says that when not using proxying through Cloudflare the results may not be correct … WHY IS THIS NOT STATED IN THE DOCUMENTATION!?!

I am directly querying Cloudflare DNS servers for the IP using dig:

dig @1.1.1.1 mysite.com

And it constantly flip flops between Wyoming and Virginia.

When I traceroute 1.1.1.1 it clearly goes directly to Cloudflare Georgia data center … so WHY is Cloudflare returning the IP of a server in Wyoming??

9  172.71.20.2 (172.71.20.2)  26.979 ms
    172.71.24.2 (172.71.24.2)  16.918 ms
    172.71.28.2 (172.71.28.2)  27.438 ms
10  one.one.one.one (1.1.1.1)  21.958 ms  25.338 ms  14.582 ms

Please someone answer me and don’t just let this thread die like the other one above did.

[jkamphaus]

When I do a query for the DNS in linux, it constantly switches back and forth between returning the two IP addresses. I’m in Georgia, it should be returning Virginia, not Wyoming.
No i’m not proxying through Cloudflare

This sounds like expected behavior, as mentioned by the MVP @erictung in the community post you linked.

A reply from someone at Cloudflare says that when not using proxying through Cloudflare the results may not be correct … WHY IS THIS NOT STATED IN THE DOCUMENTATION!?!

This is covered in our developer documents under limitations, I’d recommend reading the Gray-clouded section above it as well - Proxy status · Cloudflare Load Balancing docs

From the article: " * Performs slower failover and less accurate routing, because it has to rely on DNS resolvers and cache settings."

[cscharff]

@myles

I have Load Balancing setup with two servers. One in Virginia, and one in Wyoming. Lat/Lng coordinates are correct for each.

When I do a query for the DNS in linux, it constantly switches back and forth between returning the two IP addresses. I’m in Georgia, it should be returning Virginia, not Wyoming.

How /exactly/ is your load balancing configured?