Cloudflare (400ms) vs Letsencrypt (16ms) Performance
Hi Cloudflare team and community! 👋
First off, thank you for the amazing products — I’ve been a long-time user and really appreciate both the service and the generosity of the free tier.
I'm currently running into some performance issues with one of our apps and hoping to get some input.
I've attached two screenshots showing a basic HTTP OPTIONS request to our backend. This behavior is consistent across similar requests:
- With Cloudflare (free-tier proxy enabled), the request takes 400ms+
- Without Cloudflare / using only Let's Encrypt, it drops to ~16ms
Any idea what might be causing this latency? Would love some guidance or pointers.
Thanks in advance!
8 Replies
Seems like your origin is close to you, so possibly a big part of it is likely network latency to the cf pop and then back to your origin. If you go to https://<your-site>/cdn-cgi/trace what colo are you hitting and how close is that compared to where you live?
fl=952f25
h=xxx
ip=2003:c3:9f01:35fa:dde5:2a8b:6f5d:4791
ts=1752074387.355
visit_scheme=https
uag=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
colo=GIG
sliver=none
http=http/3
loc=DE
tls=TLSv1.3
sni=encrypted
warp=off
gateway=off
rbi=off
kex=X25519MLKEM768
It says GIG .... GIG is Rio de Janeiro ... we are in Germany. That explains a lot.
Thanks for the response @Walshy . Is it possible to make some adaptions to the colo?
I assume you're a Telekom customer?
yes
The connection between Cloudflare and Telekom has been extremely bad for a long time. You shouldn't expect improvements on the free plan anytime soon.
Paid plans usually have a better connection, though there's no guarantee.
Thanks for the information.
That is very fascinating.
Just google "Cloudflare Telekom" and you'll find tons of information. Short version is, Telekom wants money for peering, Cloudflare doesn't want to pay. So traffic is routed haldway across the globe instead.
And of course very troubling that Telekom is not able to provide these basics. Even as business customers.
I started doing that when you asked the questions.
It seems like a rabbit hole.
Thanks again.