Faster wherever you are: your pages are read from the nearest of eight regions

Until the end of October, every page on Designed read its data from one database in Virginia. For a member in New York that is next door. For a member in Delhi, Manila or Melbourne, every one of those reads crossed the world and back, and a page makes several of them: checking who you are alone cost about a fifth of a second on every page from Asia and Oceania.

The database now has copies in seven more regions — Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Oregon and São Paulo — and every request is answered from the one nearest the Cloudflare data center it arrived at. It started with the public pages: news, events, jobs, the mentor directory. Since then the sign-in check moved too, and on 5 November your own data followed: notifications, your profile, saved jobs and events, your career plans and the member side of critique, projects and learning.

Writing is the one thing that does not move. Everything you save, post or change still goes to the main database in Virginia, and a page that has just made a change reads it back from there, so you never see your own edit missing. The copies trail the main database by a fraction of a second.

The routing looks after itself. If a region stops answering, the data centers that use it switch to the next nearest within about twenty minutes and come back when it recovers. A small sample of real requests is also timed against a second region, and a data center that would clearly be faster elsewhere is moved there. You can see all of it, live, on the status page.