My Experience With Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing Greatly Improving Access Speed in Chinese Mainland
目录
Software translation
Background
Cloudflare’s free plan provides unlimited CDN, DDoS protection, and a 15 year source server TLS certificate, among other useful services, which are very helpful for building websites.
This cannot use nodes located in Chinese Mainland. All data is transferred from overseas (outside Chinese Mainland) to Chinese Mainland. According to their sales staff, only nodes with less than 20% Cloudflare can be used.
After using the free plan, it may take nearly 50 seconds to load the website when you visit the website through http3 at night in Chinese Mainland.
Why do we need Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing
The traditional Internet routing (BGP border gateway protocol) is responsible for telling which routes are available from point A to point B. But it usually only chooses the “existing” route, not the “best” route. These roads may be very congested, take long detours, or have poor road conditions.
Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing is an additional service that utilizes Cloudflare’s global network (covering 330 cities, with 13000 networks directly connected to Cloudflare, including all major ISPs, cloud providers, and enterprises) to detect and bypass congestion in real-time, and route traffic to the most efficient network path, accelerating access speed.
Experience/Testing Environment
The source server is the vps in the east of the united states, which is more than 10000 kilometers away from the test site in Chinese Mainland.
RTT (round-trip time, which is the time it takes for data to travel from the local to the server and then back) is approximately 240-260ms.
The homepage of the built website only transfers HTML files ranging from several kb to tens of kb.
Use Cloudflare’s free plan to activate CDN.
How to Enable
Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing requires an additional fee to use, with a monthly base fee of $5 (including the first GB of data), and $0.1 per GB beyond that. The fee includes the total upstream and downstream data.
So first, you need to add a payment method. It is recommended to use MasterCard or Visa card. If possible, you can go to Hong Kong and other overseas regions to apply, or several banks in Chinese Mainland can apply at the age of 16. It is strongly not recommended to use a virtual card.
Then, simply click a few times on the dashboard to activate it
Actual measurement results
| Comparison items | Free plan only | Enable Argo |
| Http3 night access | Slowest by nearly 50 seconds, very severe lag | 200+milliseconds, smooth opening |
| Http2 daytime access | 1-2 seconds, open the flash card | 200+milliseconds, smooth opening |
After activation, in many cases, the access time is already less than the RTT of the direct connection.
This means that accessing the source server through Cloudflare is faster than directly accessing the source server.
Compare Cloudflare Pro Plan
Cloudflare Pro Program The current price is $20 per month, which is enough for a free plan+Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing with a monthly total of 151GB for both upstream and downstream traffic.
Refer to Cloudflare official website And this high-quality blog found online Home Data Center Series Cloudflare Pro Deep Experience: From Free to Pro, Is It Worth Upgrading?
The Cloudflare Pro program has a lot of powerful WAF (Web Application Firewall, used to intercept malicious requests), more customizable optimizations, richer health information, and possibly much faster first byte arrival times.
If there is a need for these aspects, or if the total uplink and downlink traffic exceeds 151GB per month, upgrading directly to the Cloudflare Pro plan instead of using Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing is probably a better choice. The rich man can take it all.
When to use Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing
For delay sensitive use cases. For example, when opening website pages or real-time chat software, the slower the speed, the easier it is for people to leave.
These situations should consider using Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing.
Note that enabling 1000GB costs $104.9. For high traffic use cases such as video playback, online storage upload and download, use with caution to avoid high fees.