The Sydney store that kept timing out at 2am

The Sydney store that kept timing out at 2am

A 40k-pageview Shopify-on-headless store sold mostly to Australia, but the origin sat in Virginia. Every cache miss meant a 310ms round trip back to us-east-1, and during the AU evening peak the origin pool choked — checkout calls hit 4–6s and bounced.

The miss rate wasn't the problem. The fan-out was. Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland edge nodes each pulled from origin independently, multiplying load.

What we changed: turned on origin shield pinned to a Singapore tier, so all APAC POPs fanned into one shielded node before reaching Virginia. Cache misses now traveled SYD → SIN → IAD once, then served the region.

Origin requests dropped 71%. p95 product-page latency in Sydney went from 1.9s to 340ms. Checkout timeouts during peak: gone for three straight weeks.

The number that mattered: 71% fewer origin hits.