<b>The Sydney store that timed out at checkout</b>

<b>The Sydney store that timed out at checkout</b>

A 40k-pageview fashion store ran a single origin in Frankfurt. Sydney shoppers waited 680ms just for the HTML to start streaming, and the cart page — uncached because of a session cookie — pushed past 2.3s. Conversions in APAC sat 40% below Europe.

The fix was not "add a CDN," they already had one. The problem was the cart cookie busting cache on every page. We stripped the session cookie from cache keys on everything except <code>/cart</code> and <code>/checkout</code>, and let the edge serve the catalog cold-free.

Sydney time-to-first-byte dropped to 90ms off the local edge node. Origin requests fell from 1.0 to 0.18 per pageview. APAC conversion closed two-thirds of the gap with Europe within three weeks.

The number that mattered: 680ms to 90ms in Sydney.