Traffic through cloudflare is much slower than direct IP

[sooperooday]

What is the name of the domain?

librespeed.engager.rooday.com

What is the issue you’re encountering

Slower speeds for traffic through cloudflare DNS

What feature, service or problem is this related to?

I don’t know

What are the steps to reproduce the issue?

I have a plex server in MA, USA, and I live in WA, USA. A couple months ago I noticed the speeds became unusably slow, like ~4mbps when I used to get something like 150 (I’ve confirmed that the internet plan for the server hasn’t changed as speed tests will show it getting like 500+mbps up/down). To check speeds I also run an instance of librespeed on this server (both plex and librespeed are behind a traefik router), and when I ran the test from my client in WA, it was getting around 4mbps down and 235 up. However if I run this test using the direct IP:port, I get 14.7mbps down and 553 mbps up.

This confirms that direct connection is faster, but both of these speeds are a far cry from what I used to get (and seeing how fast the upload is, clearly it’s not an issue with my client unable to transfer data at those rates with the server). Would anyone have any ideas on debugging this? I don’t have my traffic proxied through cloudflare, I only use it for DNS, so not sure why it would be impacting speeds, and then only in one direction (from the server to my client).

[sjr]

@sooperooday

I don’t have my traffic proxied through cloudflare, I only use it for DNS,

At the moment it is proxied…
https://cf.sjr.org.uk/tools/check?a831f0354a6d49c096257aee0fa5ad6b#dns

[sooperooday]

D’oh, I think I see why. I was earlier just looking at this:

I thought that the A record for engager there was also the wildcard, but further down I had this (with proxy enabled, I just turned it off).

I’ll wait a bit and try again and see if my speeds to my librespeed instance improve. On the other hand though, plex should be directly connecting to the IP, as plex uses your account for server discovery (when initializing a new server you add your account), so it shouldn’t be using DNS/cloudflare for routing anyways. Would you have any ideas there?

[sooperooday]

Just undid the proxy for the wildcard but speeds are still pretty bad compared to direct IP:

vs.

And both of these are far less than the speedtest I’m getting on the server:

❯ speedtest

   Speedtest by Ookla

      Server: SELCO - Shrewsbury, MA (id: 4981)
         ISP: Verizon Fios
Idle Latency:     3.95 ms   (jitter: 0.42ms, low: 3.02ms, high: 4.71ms)
    Download:   729.23 Mbps (data used: 357.5 MB)
                  7.25 ms   (jitter: 1.54ms, low: 4.25ms, high: 11.05ms)
      Upload:   127.47 Mbps (data used: 160.7 MB)
                  4.33 ms   (jitter: 3.07ms, low: 3.46ms, high: 217.62ms)
 Packet Loss: Not available.

I’d expect much closer to 127 mbps for the librespeed tests.

[Vanderlindemedia]

I would highly recommend using IPV6 instead of just IPV4 through Cloudflare. Add them using AAAA records - there’s a significant speed increase by going to IPV6 in between your host and CF.