CloudFlare worker cache performance issues

[codexmas]

Howdy y'all!

Been really liking the direction emdash is going and started rolling out some small blog sites to get off of Wordpress and Webflow.

Started to encounter some odd performance issues of intermittent long and slow page loads and spent the last few days with Claude trying to chase the root cause down.

The short form is wrangler not setting the placement to a single colo so requests from each region triggers a true cold start.

What I was seeing was great performance locally (in region) and then terrible 10+ second page loads and even timeouts from other regions.

"placement": { "region": "aws:us-west-2" },

Adding this line to wrangler effectively locks the workers to that colo and keeps the caches warm. The additional hop for other regions is there but far better than constant cold start.

So low traffic, probably even medium level traffic sites should see much more consistent performance using this tactic.

Anyone else have similar experiences?

[swissky]

Had the same issues this week with pages taking 10 seconds. At the moment we are looking if we should build a cache warmer.

[codexmas]

Claude kept recommending a cache warmer, which would only solve for however many regions you choose to trigger it for. I kept rejecting the advice as it has always been a bandaid solution.

The warmer would have to run every ~2 minutes for all pages multiplied by however many regions you want warmed.

Essentially every CloudFlare region is an edge cache by default:

Default Behavior
Runs in the data center closest to the end user

Smart Placement
Automatically selects the optimal location for multiple or unknown backends.

Explicit Placement
Uses region, host, or hostname to target specific cloud regions or external hosts.

It is an enterprise shaped solution for high traffic sites.
I think of the single region as traditional hosting where your server isn't co-located at all.
Small price to pay for reliable performance.

[codexmas]

The alternative of using Tiered caches means rendering pages as HTML, which prevents the dynamic aspects of Astro from being used. Perhaps a solution for many sites?
It would be possible to use Tiered caching for everything non admin with path exclusions. Cleaner option would be to use the worker domain for admin needs.