Degraded routing on free plan?
Hi. We have some Web APIs running on Cloudflare's Pro plan and now a new API running on the free plan. We noticed that the free plan's site is routed to some Cloudflare data center "anywhere" on the planet, but barely at our home location (based nearby Frankfurt/Germany, FRA data center). Is this a shortcoming of the free plan? I didn't find anything about it in the documentation.
I've written a small application which connects several times to our free plan's API and outputs the runtime and the CF-RAY response header as well.
6 Replies
Further connections, going to Hongkong etc. ...
To answer my own question: yes, free plan makes the difference. We upgraded our Web API site to "Pro Plan" and et voila: requests are completely served by FRA as nearest data center. I think some valuable documentation is missing here (or have I missed it?).
I don't know if there's any exact documentation on it other then references and such like in: https://blog.cloudflare.com/meet-traffic-manager/
There's no promises or guarantees, it's just that when traffic needs to be shed/capacity is an issue, each plan is rerouted until it is not.
Traffic Manager then identifies how much traffic in each plan we need to move, and moves either a proportion of the plan, or all of the plan through Plurimog/Duomog, until we've moved enough traffic. We move Free customers first, and if there are no more Free customers in a data center, we'll move Pro, and then Business customers if needed.Some of it is also ISP Routing, Cloudflare doesn't have complete control over how routing works, you can view it as they can make "suggestions" and further work with ISPs to get the best paths/etc. Traffic Manager, as detailed in that recent blog, is actually an attempt at better control over those routes If you absolutely need better routing, try out/look into Argo Smart Routing. It'll cost you, but they have "Enterprise like" inbound routing as well from what I remember testing wise, as well as just helping latency in general. If you wanted any guarantees though, need Enterpise
Thanks for that. Is Traffic Manager something new (since the blog post is also just 1 week old)? We didn't experience such behavior before, I mean >90% of the traffic from free plan has been served by some data center != FRA.
I'm also wondering why data centers on the other side of the world like HKG and SIN jumped in, instead of nearer data centers in Europe. I don't believe that no nearer data center was available to serve the requests, but of course it's a blackbox.
no, Traffic Manager is just a new way for Cloudflare to do those rerouting more intelligently. The actual rerouting has been around forever, as far as I know
Could be your ISP routing things poorly, Traffic Manager is an attempt to get more control over that by actually testing real-world reroutes. Ultimately though, they only have so much control over what your ISP does. Interesting though if you were routed that crazily, makes it seem more like an ISP issue or something to do with how you were measuring things. What were you testing against? Just a normal proxied origin? If you test now vs a free website, did it settle down/be more consistent?
Yeah, it is just a normal proxied origin. When I test now with the Pro plan, as you can see above, things settled down and requests are served consistently by FRA (every 50th request or so it's served by HKG, which is strange, but it seems more to be a corner case). The "crazy" behavior of the free plan can still be observed on another domain that we have at Cloudflare. On it the crazy data center switch is still happening. And it's not only my local ISP, it happens also on our servers, which have a completely different ISP.