Routing wrong country

DNS & Network
,
#1

Hi,

My server is in Sydney Australia and Im in Perth Australia and ive notices over the last few weeks my sites load time has decreased dramatically. I couldn’t figure out what the issue was until i bypassed Cloudflare DNS and the site was loading significantly faster… Faster than Ive noticed for well over a year.

I tested and found the following

cloudlfare = 13.24 seconds
no Cloudflare = 3.77 seconds

almost 10 seconds faster without Cloudflare.

It seems that there are edge servers in multiple places in Australia including where my server is and also where I am located, there dont seem to be any outages on the status page either.

I shutdown the server for a minute to see if anything would load from Cloudflare and it shows hongkong

is all the traffic being routed via hongkong? or am I going crazy :slight_smile:

Im not sure what else to test or how to rectify this. Does anyone have a clue why this is happening?

Routing in Russia
#2

Hey there. You can check this article, or simply go to yourdomain.com/cdn-cgi/trace to verify which datacenter you’re hitting.
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169986-Which-Cloudflare-data-center-do-I-reach-

I’m not sure what would cause this, but I’m sure others will chime in :smiley:

#3

Due to high costs of providing service in Australia currently only Business and Enterprise customers utilize the OZ POPs. As our footprint and peering options improve in the region this may change.

3 Likes
Changing Cloudflare Data Server
#4

Wow, so we have to pay $200 a month to use Australian POP’s?

#5

Unfortunately, that is probably the case. As long as they are charging what they charge and refusing to peer the costs are significant.

Transit prices in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) are lower than they used to be, but continue to be extremely high in relative terms, costing 17 times the benchmark from Europe, or 170 units. We peer 50% of our traffic, resulting in an effective cost of 85 units.

If you exclude Optus and Telstra, then the price falls to 17 units — because we peer with nearly everyone else.

#6

@ryan @cscharff
I am accessing sites from India and there are 3 POPs of Cloudflare here in India.

Location of the POPs are:

  • New Delhi, IN
  • Chennal, IN
  • Mumbai, IN

But all my sites are getting data (DNS Response and Cache HITs) from London (LHR) POP.
Is cost the reason for the same or something else?

Some months back the POP was used to be DEL (Delhi, IN) but now it is using LHR POP.
What is the reason behind it?

1 Like
CDN is not choosing the best datacenter
#7

Namaskar w3dev,

Similar answer to above. India is another country where cost and capacity are an issue so we have chosen to limit some of them to paid plans. We continue to push forward with our expansion plans, both in terms of number of datacenters and footprints/ capacity in each this may change.

On the plus side, places like Mumbai continue to validate the need for our services and India is a growing market for us to service with a number of in country providers. I suspect our expansion there will actually outpace some of our other regions (trying to convince my boss I could work from India as well).

2 Likes
Cloudflare traffic routing in Australia
#8

Aussie bandwidth is so expensive, so yeah can’t fault Cloudflare for restricting it to Business and higher plans

1 Like
#9

So from which plan I can get access to Indian Datacenters?
Plan from $20/month of Plan from $200/month

#10

Well some portion of traffic may be served from the Sydney DC (I believe last estimate I saw was about 50% of ISPs) for lower tier plans may be served local. But this could change depending on load and capacity. So it’s not a $200 or nothing question for all of OZ, but for the question you asked that was the reason.

Sorry I know that might sound defensive, I’m not actually trying to be it’s just a bit complicated to describe something that can be as dynamic as our network some days.

1 Like
#11

I am facing similar issues like @w3dev when accessing sites using the Free Plan in India (the data center being chosen is always London or Singapore) For Pro plan, I notice that Indian data centers are used (Is this something to do with improved latency feature provided in Pro Plans? - Refer to screenshot)

Latency
Latency.png1555×888 93.4 KB

Would using Agro ( https://www.cloudflare.com/argo/ ) have even better performance than Pro Plan in terms of choice of the data center?

#12

@prayag.verma raises an interesting point that begs the question: is this just related to Australia / India regions or are there limitations placed on number of data centers utilized for folks using the Free plan?

i.e. https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/free/ lists “Global CDN” as a feature, but that bullet point is ambiguous (could mean just n% of data centers out of the 118). The feature matrix at https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#compare-features lists CDN as all plans being equal. Based on the information in this thread that doesn’t really seem like the case…?

I’m not trying to be cynical, just curious if there’s more information re: definition of “Global CDN” as it relates to Free vs. Paid plans.

I’m a firm believer in ‘you get what you pay for’ - and so far I’m paying zero and getting a lot - so thanks Cloudflare for that! However, perhaps more transparent indication to users that they’re not really getting everything out of Cloudflare on the Free plan is one (maybe rather nefarious) method of upselling…? I’m under the impression CDN is one of the top 3 reasons folks sign up for Cloudflare.

#13

At the moment I don’t believe Argo alone changes the available POPs though this is an action/feature which is actively under discussion.

@andy I don’t disagree that it would be nice to have more insight into colos per plan, but that is somewhat of a moving target at the moment. It is feedback that I have passed on to several teams.

That being said I really can’t overstate how much effort is being made into both increasing the number of colos in these regions (and making new peering connections along with it) and increasing throughput and capacity in the existing colos. Our network expansion team updates us internally on a regular basis and I’ve sort of become numb to the staggering improvements they’ve made since I joined. I’ve been working in the SaaS field for 17+ years now and seriously the scale and speed which our team works at on improving and expanding the network is orders of magnitude beyond any company/ group I’ve ever worked with.

If you read about our latest POP brought online this week they mention ‘at least 10 others planned’ in the same region. I believe our plans in the regions we’ve been discussing here are at least as aggressive.

1 Like
#14

Sorry if I came off as crass - I do appreciate the rate of colo expansion Cloudflare is maintaining. It’s actually quite impressive to follow the blog and see a new one being brought online every few months or so. The effort required to ‘spin up’ a new datacenter is not lost on me, so rate of expansion is very cool, and solidifies the notion that Cloudflare intends to continue to make the internet better and faster for all :rocket:

#15

No not crass at all. I am entirely sympathetic to your request. I lack a decent mapping even internally (in part because it’s in flux so often) so I share your pain. I hope it becomes a non-issue in the very near future through expansion because we currently don’t do a good job of presenting the lay of the land.

4 Likes
#16

How about a table of country and percentage of traffic affected? And a note that it’s subject to change frequently?

Something like that could hopefully be autogenerated from your analytics, and it may not be too telling.

1 Like
#17

It’s mid 2018 and still Free plan users are not benefited with serving from any of the 3 Cloudflare’s Indian POPs. Still my site is served from LHR (London) which is 7400KMS or 4500 miles away when requested from any Indian location :frowning:

I’ve read through the above discussion that Indian POPs are offered to paid plan users. But how about Cloudflare serving content to Indian users (on free plan) from either:

Only 1 Indian location out of the 3
Or a nearest POP to India like: Singapore (SIN) or Hong Kong?

In the both the above scenarios the latency will be dramatically reduced and its better than serving from London!

#19

@itdjsingh,

@cscharff just mentioned in this post that all POPs are now available to all plans:

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#20

Good news: We no longer have the limitations I described previously (as I said at the time, things are/were in flux). At this point all colos (except China POPs) are are available on all plans. Specific connections are based on the peering decisions by individual network providers.

3 Likes
Does Cloudflare work well for australia sites
Cloudflare traffic routing in Australia
Indian NS and A records
#21

So…I think this means that theoretically, all visitors are routed through the fastest datacenter.