Worker running in unexpected location despite Smart Placement being disabled
Hi everyone,
I’m experiencing an issue with my Cloudflare Worker where it’s running in a location that’s far from my users, despite Smart Placement being disabled. I’ve checked the settings and confirmed that Smart Placement is indeed disabled, but the Worker is still running in Marseille, FR, which is causing high latency for my users in Bengaluru, India.
I’ve tried troubleshooting the issue, but I’m not sure what’s causing the Worker to run in a different location. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Details:
Location: Bengaluru, India
Expected location: Data center closest to Bengaluru, India
Actual location: Marseille, FR
Smart Placement: Disabled
Thanks in advance for your help!
19 Replies
How are you confirming where the worker is running?
I would recommend checking request.cf.colo: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/request/#incomingrequestcfproperties
showing on dashboard,
I would recommend still adding some logging to confirm (or returning it as a header for your users to verify), you might not be looking at the requests you think you are
ok checking
its MRS, Marseille, France.
Interesting; and you aren’t using a vpn?
nope
Can you confirm that ipinfo geolocates you in India?
:thonk:
not a single request is getting hit by indian pops
i am trying since yesterday
all request are going to either germany or france
and the latency for the api is around 1500-3000, which is really bad for this simple api which is just returning an object
Accessing your page locally gives me my closest data center (US), which is interesting
cc. @Walshy | DevPlat EE
what could be the issue
So for the request colo, pretty normal for non-paid zones. India is expensive to route in and can be quite tricky due to the ISPs there. We will commonly serve free traffic outside of India
?anycast for more
Take a look here to see why the Cloudflare datacenter you are routed towards isn't always the closest geographically: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/cdn/glossary/anycast-network/
Jesus this is an old blog now... but this is a good (slightly outdated) look at network costs globally: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/#six-expensive-networks
This blog post seems to summarize why India is a problem in routing traffic: https://mattgadient.com/matts-geolocation-anycast-and-server-location-notes/
Matt’s geolocation, anycast, and server location notes | mattgadi...
Aiming for low latency: Notes I made while setting up an Anycast + Geolocation + Latency Based Routing configuration for worldwide traffic.
(Specifically the section on India, for why it can be bad when you try and connect outside of India)
Thank you guys, super helpful.