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OP's note about Johannesburg's latency is something I've noticed over the past few weeks in particular. Our servers are hosted in South Africa, yet accessing mo

OP's note about Johannesburg's latency is something I've noticed over the past few weeks in particular. Our servers are hosted in South Africa, yet accessing most of our sites and services from within South Africa causes traffic to be re-routed via other nodes, mostly London (LHR). This is easy to verify by appending cdn-cgi/trace onto a Cloudflare-proxied domain. Something is definitely up with Cloudflare's Johannesburg data centre. On particularly bad days, TTFB routinely reaches 1-3 seconds. Bypassing Cloudflare immediately drops this to sub 100ms. In the past, I would have emailed support@cloudflare.com, but it seems that this channel is no longer available for free tier users. What is the recommended approach these days for reporting issues such as this?

emadda 3y ago
> This is easy to verify by appending cdn-cgi/trace onto a Cloudflare-proxied domain. Nice tip thanks
Havoc 3y ago
I’ve seen this a couple times before not just CF but other ISP too. Must be something funky with peering politics in SA perhaps
- richardkeller 3y ago
  From the bit of digging that I've done, it's all free tier domains that are affected. Paid tiers are not affected by this. Given that I've tested from multiple different ISPs, I think this is the fault of Cloudflare intentionally de-prioritising free tier traffic, rather than an issue with local routing.
jshier 3y ago
Only remaining support channel is their community forums. Whether you'll get an official response is another question. I don't recall Cloudflare routing request to their free clients differently than paid, but I've read multiple reports of that happening recently. Change in policy or fallout from something else?
- bishopsmother 3y ago
  An example community forum query, albeit from 2021, regarding Periodic Cloudflare Worker datacenter allocation issues: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/periodic-cloudflare-worker-datacenter-allocation-issues/264934 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/periodic-cloudflare-worke... . In summary: no official response/conclusion. Users in the UK having their traffic sent to Australian Cloudflare DC Workers was quite the round-trip/tromboning-a-go-go...

emadda 3y ago

> This is easy to verify by appending cdn-cgi/trace onto a Cloudflare-proxied domain. Nice tip thanks

Havoc 3y ago

I’ve seen this a couple times before not just CF but other ISP too. Must be something funky with peering politics in SA perhaps

richardkeller 3y ago
From the bit of digging that I've done, it's all free tier domains that are affected. Paid tiers are not affected by this. Given that I've tested from multiple different ISPs, I think this is the fault of Cloudflare intentionally de-prioritising free tier traffic, rather than an issue with local routing.

jshier 3y ago

Only remaining support channel is their community forums. Whether you'll get an official response is another question. I don't recall Cloudflare routing request to their free clients differently than paid, but I've read multiple reports of that happening recently. Change in policy or fallout from something else?

bishopsmother 3y ago
An example community forum query, albeit from 2021, regarding Periodic Cloudflare Worker datacenter allocation issues: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/periodic-cloudflare-worker-datacenter-allocation-issues/264934 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/periodic-cloudflare-worke... . In summary: no official response/conclusion. Users in the UK having their traffic sent to Australian Cloudflare DC Workers was quite the round-trip/tromboning-a-go-go...