ISPs are the real culprit
May 9, 2023 random 2 min read
I proxy all my sites through Cloudflare because of how easy and fast it is. But recently I have been noticing that the sites are taking more time to load than expected. It took exactly 1.3 mins to load after the DNS cache was cleared.
The delay
This was odd and bad as it takes too much time to load a simple site. So I tried to curl the same endpoint and it finally showed the problem.
The culprit
Here we can see that there are two IPs assigned by Cloudflare in my region. The first one was 172.67.198.57 which doesn’t respond at all and times out after 75 seconds. The second one was 104.21.44.89 which gave instant responses. I checked on Chrome which IP the site was resolving to, and yes, it was resolving to the second IP after a 1.3 minute wait.
Moving away
After checking Twitter and the Cloudflare community about this, I understood that a few Indian ISPs are the real culprits here where I live. They are blocking the first IP which is delaying the response. So rather than waiting for 1.3 minutes, I just shifted all my sites to my own server and let go of Cloudflare’s sweet sweet features.
I hope no one DDoSes my puny VM.
Ciao!!!
A funny end
[2023-05-12]: I finally got my HN home page internet fame for 20 mins