Comment by richardkeller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by richardkeller | Hacker News Reader

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?

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?

An example community forum query, albeit from 2021, regarding Periodic Cloudflare Worker datacenter allocation issues: 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...

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

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.

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

Nice tip thanks

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