The problem

A recipe site runs in Frankfurt. A user in Singapore opens a recipe page, and the app makes 6 database queries to build it. Each query goes to Frankfurt and back in 160 ms, so the queries alone take 960 ms.

Users in Europe see the same page in 80 ms. Asia is now 40% of the traffic, and the Asian users stop at page two.

The team wants the Asian pages as fast as the European ones. Saving a recipe or a comment may stay slower.