Slow TLS Handshake from India to EU Server

Application Performance
1

What is the name of the domain?

http://bikeconnect.ovh

What is the issue you’re encountering

Slow TLS Handshake from India to EU Server

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

I’m on the Cloudflare Free plan and hoping to get some insight into a high latency issue when making api requests to my server. My setup is as follows:

Client/Device Location: India
Server (VPS) Location: Germany
Cloudflare SSL/TLS Mode: Full
Client response time: each rest api call takes 900ms
Server processing time: My server logs show requests are processed in just ~5ms.

Here’s breakdown of the timings which I captured in my android app.

DNS Start: 0ms
DNS End: 3ms
Connect Start: 6ms
TLS Handshake Start: 228ms
TLS Handshake End: 464ms
Connect End: 477ms
Response Headers Start: 848ms
Response Headers End: 850ms
Response Body Start: 866ms
Response Body End: 872ms
Call End: 874ms

Initial Connect (Client → Cloudflare) takes 477ms of which majority is TLS handshake.
The time between Connect End (477ms) and Response Headers Start (848ms) is 371ms. Since my server only takes 5ms, this 371ms must be the time taken for Cloudflare → Origin → Cloudflare → Client. When I ping my origin directly it shows “time=168ms TTL=52”

I checked cgi trace (https://bikeconnect.ovh/cdn-cgi/trace) and it says colo=MRS (France)

fl=49f431
h=bikeconnect.ovh
ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
ts=1750662258.669
visit_scheme=https
uag=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/137.0.0.0
colo=MRS
sliver=none
http=http/3
loc=IN
tls=TLSv1.3
sni=encrypted
warp=off
gateway=off
rbi=off
kex=X25519
  1. Why is my traffic from India being routed to the Marseille (MRS) data center instead of a closer one in India?
  2. How can I reduce the initial 477ms Initial connection/TLS handshake time and the 371ms to receive response.
2

This may be because your ISP is routing it that way as it is cheaper for them. Or it may be that Cloudflare is not advertising free plans from that data centre due to congestion or maintenance and your ISP’s next best/cheapest route is a long one. This has been a common problem in India, although recently Cloudflare announced a lot of new PoPs in India and many of those are co-located inside ISPs.

You may find a paid plan peers better, but that’s not guaranteed and may change so is up to you to decide.