There are many ways to quickly get and use a GeoIP DB like MaxMind, most requiring way less than 20 minutes. This is just one example of something I started using recently:
docker run -p 8080:8080 -d fiorix/freegeoip curl localhost:8080/json/1.2.3.4
docker run -p 8080:8080 -d fiorix/freegeoip curl localhost:8080/json/1.2.3.4
Running a Docker container in production is not a 20 minute job.
Connected to 35.165.108.15:443
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.8.1
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2017 08:54:40 GMT
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Connection: keep-alive
Body discarded
DNS Lookup TCP Connection TLS Handshake Server Processing Content Transfer
[ 4ms | 244ms | 518ms | 525ms | 0ms ]
| | | | |
namelookup:4ms | | | |
connect:248ms | | |
pretransfer:767ms | |
starttransfer:1292ms |
total:1292msIt’s great for checking something quickly, otherwise you have the same thing in browser’s dev tools.
(Not to mention with very minimal effort you can usually avoid the majority of the specific tax of latency you mention, by doing things like parallelizing the request with other work or doing it asynchronously to the user's interface.)