Why is Cloudflare sending my us-west traffic to London?
I'm building a website that I'm hosting on a Hetzner cloud server in us-west with a free Cloudflare proxy sitting in front of it. However for the past few weeks I've observed a dramatic increase in server response times when testing from multiple west coast locations in both Canada and USA.
I thought I might've introduced a regression in the application layer, but the pattern I saw was strange. The latency
would only spike on weekdays from around 8am-6pm PST i.e. peak hours. Note that the site is still a WIP and has 0 real-user traffic.
After some digging I've confirmed the issue isn't happening at the application layer, but rather at the network/Cloudflare level. When I check
mydomain.com/cdn-cgi/trace during peak hours, the Cloudflare data centre processing the request is very far from both me and the origin server (e.g. LHR London). And then it changes to something closer during off-hours. I've also confirmed latencies returns to normal when I disable Cloudflare proxying.
Some Cloudflare community members have described that the issue is actually a business problem with ISP-Cloudflare peering agreements rather than a technical problem: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/very-slow-server-response-time/611853/3 . But they say the fix is to go from a free plan to a paid plan, and I've tried that but the latency still persists... I did go to pro though so maybe I need to go to business? I'd rather confirm the issue before committing to that.
I'm not really sure where to go from here. Has anyone gone through anything similar before? Am I missing anything obvious?3 Replies
known issue, https://discord.com/channels/595317990191398933/1409539854747963523/1409694837825081355, upgrading to Pro does reduce it, but not very much
very relevant thread, thank you for linking that
If you want to see plan differences, I posted a comment at the very bottom of it: https://discord.com/channels/595317990191398933/1409539854747963523/1410374175683772436