Extremely Slow First Request Latency from India (6–7s) — Subsequent Requests Fast (Singapore Region)
venkatshiva
HOBBYOP

2 months ago

I’m running a production backend on Railway deployed in asia-southeast1 (Singapore).
Most of my users are in India, and I’m consistently seeing a major issue:

exclamation emoji First request takes 6–7 seconds

After that, all subsequent requests are fast (100–200 ms).

I confirmed the issue:

  • My backend is not slow

  • I have logs for any request >1s --> no slow logs at all

  • So the delay happens before the request reaches my server

  • It looks like cold-start–like behavior or network/edge warm-up issues

  • Happens randomly but very frequently for new connections from India

  • All users impacted are from India → Railway Singapore route

This is hurting user experience badly because:

  • First API call from India sometimes freezes for 6–7 seconds

  • Subsequent requests are instant (so server processing is fine)

  • It feels like Cloudflare → Railway routing or region warmup latency

Request

Can someone from the team look into this routing / cold-edge behavior?

Also, is there:

  • Any known issue for India → Singapore latency spikes?

  • Any network warmup or region handshake on first request?

  • Any recommended config to avoid slow first request latency?

If possible, please consider adding India region (asia-south) in the future
since the majority of Railway users are from India and this would eliminate the high initial latency.

Thank you!

$10 Bounty

4 Replies

Make sure serverless is disabled in your service settings.


0x5b62656e5d

Make sure serverless is disabled in your service settings.

venkatshiva
HOBBYOP

2 months ago

It's already disabled.


yuno-code
PRO

2 months ago

I have this same issue, but in USA east, its like after 30 minutes inactive, requests are extremely slow and time out
Pro plan, US East

  • 6-11 second first requests from external IPs

  • 81ms from your own machine

  • Pattern: first request slow, subsequent fast

  • Container is warm, not traditional cold start


darseen
HOBBYTop 5% Contributor

2 months ago

If you're using *.up.railway.app default domain, ISPs sometimes deprioritize or flag traffic to shared generic domains like railway.app, herokuapp.com, or onrender.com . You need to use a custom domain to get this resolved in this case.

This issue happend to a user before, and he said they got it resolved by using a custom domain. Check the issue here.


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