Speed and Performance

You're assisting a customer who recently moved their global e-commerce site behand Cloudflare. They've enabled standard caching (CDN + proxy enabled on example.com) and have not made any Page Rules or Cache Rules. The customer expected cached performance in all regions to be close to 0.2s. They're asking why South America and Southeast Asia are slower, even with Cloudflare..

Initial Bounce to the Customer

Hello [Customer Name],

Good day! I am Jane from the Cloudflare Support team, and I am glad to assist you with this case.

Thanks for sharing the detailed test results, which have been very helpful. I understand that with Cloudflare default caching enabled, you've observed differences in the time_total value (the total time taken for a web request to complete) across different regions and would like to understand the cause.

Based on the test results, we noticed that the time_total values in the Frankfurt (FRA) and Virginia (IAD) regions are approximately 0.2 seconds, while the values are significantly higher in the Singapore (SIN) and Sao Paulo (GRU) regions.

By examining the cf-cache-status and CF-Ray Location headers, we can see that the content was cached and served from Cloudflare edge servers in FRA and IAD. In contrast, the content was not cached in SIN and GRU, which resulted in higher time_total values.

  • HIT: The resource was found and served from Cloudflare's cache.
  • MISS: The resource was not found in the cache and was fetched from the origin server.

    • You might wonder why some edge servers can cache the content while others do not—especially since the tests were performed on the same domain (example.com), and the server returned consistent cacheability settings. A likely explanation is that the cache had expired or was not yet populated in the SIN and GRU regions at the time of the requests.

    To investigate further, could you please collect and share HAR files when accessing the site from both Frankfurt and Singapore? This will help us analyze the cache behavior and response headers more closely.

    Thanks for your cooperation!

    Best Regards,
    Jane Gang
    Cloudflare Support Engineer

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