> So if you call fetch() twice in a row, to the same hostname, does it reuse a connection?
In my testing, the second fetch() call from a worker to the same origin ran over the same TCP connection 50% of the time and was much faster.
We want to use Workers as a reverse proxy - to pick up all HTTP requests globally and then route them to our backend. So our use-case is mostly one fetch() call (to the origin) per one incoming call. The issue is that incoming requests arrive to a ~random worker in the user's POP, and it looks like each Worker isolate has to re-establish its own TCP/TLS connection to our backend, which takes a long time (~90% of the time).
What I want is Hyperdrive for HTTPS connections. I tried connecting to backend via CF Tunnel, but that didn't make any difference. Our backend is accessible via AWS Global Accelerator, so Argo won't help much. The only thing that made a difference was pinning the Worker close to our backend - connections to the backend becamse fast(er) because the TLS roundtrip was faster, but that's not a great solution.
> The issue is that incoming requests arrive to a ~random worker in the user's POP, and it looks like each Worker isolate has to re-establish its own TCP/TLS connection to our backend, which takes a long time (~90% of the time).
Again, origin connections are not owned by isolates -- there are proxies involved before we get to the origin connection. Requests from unrelated isolates can share a connection, if the are routed to the same egress point. Problem is that they apparently aren't being routed to the same point in your case. That could be for a number of reasons.
It sounds like the bug I found may not be the issue in your case (in fact it sounds like you explicitly aren't experiencing the bug, which is surprising, maybe I am misreading the code and there actually is no bug!).
But there are other challenges the heuristics are trying to solve for, so it's not quite as simple as "all requests to the same origin hostname should go through the same egress node"... like, many of our customers get way too much traffic for just one egress node (even per-colo), so we have to be smarter than that.
I pinged someone on the relevant team and it sounds like this is something they are actively improving.
> The only thing that made a difference was pinning the Worker close to our backend - connections to the backend becamse fast(er) because the TLS roundtrip was faster, but that's not a great solution.
Argo Smart Routing should have the same effect... it causes Cloudflare to make connections from a colo close to your backend, which means the TLS roundtrip is faster.
Thank you for looking into it in such detail based on an unrelated thread!
Cloudflare seems to consistently make all types of network improvements behind the scenes, so I’ll continue to monitor for this “connection reuse” feature. It might just show up announced.
In my testing, the second fetch() call from a worker to the same origin ran over the same TCP connection 50% of the time and was much faster.
We want to use Workers as a reverse proxy - to pick up all HTTP requests globally and then route them to our backend. So our use-case is mostly one fetch() call (to the origin) per one incoming call. The issue is that incoming requests arrive to a ~random worker in the user's POP, and it looks like each Worker isolate has to re-establish its own TCP/TLS connection to our backend, which takes a long time (~90% of the time).
What I want is Hyperdrive for HTTPS connections. I tried connecting to backend via CF Tunnel, but that didn't make any difference. Our backend is accessible via AWS Global Accelerator, so Argo won't help much. The only thing that made a difference was pinning the Worker close to our backend - connections to the backend becamse fast(er) because the TLS roundtrip was faster, but that's not a great solution.