CDN Performance Benchmarks Across Asia-Pacific Regions

The Asia-Pacific region accounts for more than half of global internet traffic, yet CDN performance data for the region remains fragmented and often misleading. Benchmarks published by North American and European providers typically measure from a handful of APAC cities — Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney — and extrapolate those results across a region spanning 40 countries, 4 billion people, and 60 percent of the world's submarine cable landing points. That extrapolation breaks down in practice. A CDN that delivers 12ms TTFB in Singapore may deliver 95ms in Surabaya. One that achieves a 97% cache hit ratio in Seoul may drop to 72% in Dhaka. This article presents granular, city-level benchmark data collected from 18 measurement points across the Asia-Pacific, along with the methodology behind the numbers and actionable strategies for optimizing delivery in each sub-region.

Why APAC CDN Performance Requires Separate Benchmarking

Three structural factors make APAC CDN performance fundamentally different from North America or Europe.

Geographic complexity. The Asia-Pacific region includes archipelago nations with over 17,000 islands (Indonesia), mountainous terrain that limits terrestrial fiber routes (Nepal, Laos, Myanmar), and continental distances exceeding 10,000 kilometers from Tokyo to Perth. Unlike the contiguous land mass of North America where coast-to-coast latency stays under 70ms, APAC routing paths frequently traverse multiple submarine cable systems, each introducing 2–5ms of additional propagation delay plus the risk of congestion at cable landing stations.

Submarine cable dependencies. Over 95% of inter-country data traffic in APAC travels through submarine cables. The region's cable topology creates bottlenecks: the Malacca Strait concentrates traffic between East Asia and South/Southeast Asia through a small number of cable systems. When the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1) cable suffered a fault in 2022, Vietnam's international bandwidth dropped by roughly 20%. CDN architectures that rely on a single regional hub — typically Singapore or Hong Kong — inherit these single-point-of-failure risks.

Diverse internet exchange landscape. Japan operates 6 major IXPs with aggregate capacity exceeding 15 Tbps. Vietnam has grown rapidly with VNIX handling increasing domestic peering traffic. Meanwhile, some Pacific Island nations have no IXP at all, forcing all traffic through international transit. This disparity means that CDN architecture decisions that work in well-peered markets fail in under-served ones.

Methodology: How We Benchmark CDN Performance

The benchmarks in this article are derived from synthetic probes running on dedicated measurement nodes in 18 APAC cities, supplemented by Real User Monitoring (RUM) data from partner sites serving between 50,000 and 2 million monthly pageviews per country. All measurements use a standardized test object: a 50KB JavaScript bundle served with Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400, s-maxage=604800 headers.

Metrics collected. Each probe captures four primary CDN performance metrics: Time to First Byte (TTFB) measured from TCP connection establishment to the first byte of the HTTP response body; Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) using a synthetic 1.2MB above-the-fold hero image; cache hit ratio calculated as the percentage of requests returning an x-cache: HIT header over a 24-hour rolling window; and origin shield efficiency measured as the ratio of shield-to-origin requests versus total cache misses.

Probe infrastructure. Measurement nodes run on dedicated bare-metal servers (not cloud VMs, which introduce hypervisor jitter) in each city. Each node maintains persistent TCP connections to 3 major CDN providers and executes 720 test requests per provider per day (every 2 minutes), yielding approximately 21,600 data points per provider per city per month. We discard the top and bottom 2% of measurements to remove outliers caused by network maintenance windows and routing anomalies.

Statistical significance. For country-level comparisons, we require a minimum of 10,000 valid measurements per CDN per country before publishing a benchmark. Cities with fewer than 5,000 monthly measurements are reported with explicit confidence intervals. All latency figures in this article represent the P50 (median) unless stated otherwise; P95 and P99 values are noted where tail latency matters for the analysis.

Latency Benchmarks by Country

Japan and South Korea: The Gold Standard

Japan and South Korea consistently produce the lowest CDN latency in the Asia-Pacific region. Tokyo delivers a median TTFB of 8ms for cached static content, with P95 latency at 14ms. Seoul averages 11ms median, P95 at 19ms. These figures approach the theoretical minimum: at the speed of light in fiber, a 50km round trip takes approximately 0.5ms, and the remaining latency comes from server processing, TLS negotiation (0-RTT with TLS 1.3), and kernel-level TCP stack overhead.

Several structural advantages explain these results. Japan's JPIX and JPNAP exchanges collectively handle over 12 Tbps of peering traffic, giving CDN operators direct paths to every major Japanese ISP. South Korea's KIX provides similar density. Both countries have residential broadband penetration exceeding 90%, with average connection speeds above 150 Mbps, which means client-side bottlenecks rarely mask CDN performance. The high population density of Tokyo (14,000 people per km²) and Seoul (16,000 per km²) means a single well-placed PoP serves millions of users within a 5ms radius.

Singapore: The Regional Hub

Singapore functions as the primary interconnection hub for Southeast Asia, hosting over 70 data centers and the Equinix SG1 campus that peers with networks across ASEAN, South Asia, and Oceania. Our benchmarks show a median TTFB of 14ms for cached content served to users within Singapore, which is excellent for the region. The more revealing metric is Singapore's role as a transit point: traffic routed through Singapore to reach Jakarta adds 24ms, to reach Ho Chi Minh City adds 8–12ms, and to reach Mumbai adds 45–55ms.

CDN operators typically use Singapore as an origin shield or mid-tier cache for the broader ASEAN region. This strategy works well for countries with direct submarine cable connections to Singapore (Malaysia, Indonesia's western islands, Vietnam) but degrades for destinations that require multiple cable hops (eastern Indonesia, the Philippines' Visayas and Mindanao regions). Understanding this hub-and-spoke topology is essential when evaluating cache hierarchy designs for APAC deployments.

Vietnam: Rapid Growth and Domestic CDN Advantage

Vietnam's CDN performance has improved dramatically over the past three years. Our current benchmarks show median TTFB of 22ms in Ho Chi Minh City and 28ms in Hanoi for cached content, down from 45ms and 58ms respectively in 2023. This improvement tracks closely with the expansion of VNIX (Vietnam Internet Exchange) capacity and the deployment of domestic PoPs by both international and local CDN providers.

The domestic CDN advantage in Vietnam is particularly pronounced. Vietnamese providers operating PoPs within the country's internal network avoid the international transit path through Hong Kong or Singapore, which adds 15–30ms of round-trip latency. For businesses targeting Vietnamese users, domestic edge infrastructure reduces TTFB by 40–60% compared to serving from Singapore. Vietnamese provider VNETWORK documents the core benefits of CDN infrastructure for domestic and cross-border delivery, outlining how localized PoPs paired with Vietnamese ISP peering agreements achieve latency profiles that international-only providers cannot match from offshore locations.

Vietnam's challenge is the north-south connectivity gap. Traffic between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City traverses a 1,800km terrestrial fiber path with 8–12ms of propagation delay. CDN deployments targeting all of Vietnam need at minimum two PoPs — one in each major city — to maintain sub-30ms TTFB nationwide.

Indonesia: The Archipelago Challenge

Indonesia exemplifies the difficulty of delivering consistent CDN performance across a geographically fragmented market. Jakarta benchmarks at 38ms median TTFB, which is respectable for the region. But Surabaya (Java's second city) degrades to 78ms, and eastern Indonesian cities like Makassar and Jayapura can exceed 120ms. The standard deviation across Indonesian measurement points is the highest in our dataset at 34ms, compared to 3ms in Japan.

The root cause is Indonesia's submarine cable topology. Java connects to Singapore and the global internet through multiple cable systems, but inter-island connectivity relies on a smaller number of domestic submarine cables. Eastern Indonesia, particularly Papua, connects through a single primary cable path. CDN operators addressing the Indonesian market need a minimum of 3 PoPs (Jakarta, Surabaya, and one in Sulawesi or Kalimantan) to bring median TTFB below 50ms for 80% of the population.

Philippines: Island Connectivity Varies Widely

Manila benchmarks at 42ms median TTFB, with P95 reaching 68ms. Cebu averages 55ms, and Davao reaches 72ms. The Philippines shares Indonesia's archipelago challenges but at a smaller geographic scale. The domestic cable infrastructure connecting Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao has improved, but last-mile connectivity remains a bottleneck. Fiber penetration is lower than in Vietnam or Thailand, which means client-side delays often compound CDN edge latency.

Thailand and Malaysia: Growing IX Infrastructure

Bangkok delivers a median TTFB of 26ms, benefiting from Thailand's investment in the BKNIX internet exchange and direct submarine cable connections to both Singapore and Hong Kong. Kuala Lumpur benchmarks at 24ms, slightly faster than Bangkok due to Malaysia's proximity to Singapore and its own MyIX exchange capacity. Both countries show tight P95 distributions (under 40ms), indicating consistent CDN performance across major urban areas.

India: Scale and Diversity

India presents a unique benchmarking challenge: massive scale combined with extreme connectivity diversity. Mumbai benchmarks at 32ms from well-connected PoPs that peer with Jio, Airtel, and BSNL. Delhi averages 35ms, Bangalore 30ms, and Chennai 34ms. These tier-1 city figures mask the reality that rural India, serving over 500 million internet users, sees median TTFB exceeding 80ms due to last-mile congestion and multi-hop routing through state-level ISPs.

CDN operators in India benefit from the country's NIXI exchange system, which provides peering across 10 cities. An effective India deployment requires 4–6 PoPs minimum (Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata) to achieve sub-40ms coverage for the urban population.

Australia and New Zealand: Distance from Content Origins

Sydney benchmarks at 18ms median TTFB for cached content, reflecting Australia's well-developed IX infrastructure and high broadband speeds. Melbourne adds 4–6ms over Sydney, and Perth adds 30–35ms due to its geographic isolation on the western coast. Auckland benchmarks at 22ms, typically served from Sydney-based PoPs with a 25ms submarine cable crossing.

Australia's primary CDN challenge is not domestic latency but international content fetch times. Origin servers in the United States add 150–180ms of round-trip latency to cache miss requests. This makes cache hit ratio optimization critical: every cache miss in Australia costs 10x more latency than a cache miss in Singapore reaching a US origin.

Cache Hit Ratio Analysis Across Regions

Cache hit ratios in APAC follow a predictable pattern tied to user density per PoP. Japan achieves 96% for static assets because its concentrated population fills edge caches rapidly: a single Tokyo PoP serves requests from 38 million metropolitan residents, ensuring that popular content is almost always warm. Contrast this with Indonesia, where spreading the same total traffic across 5–7 PoPs dilutes per-location volume and increases the proportion of cache misses.

Content type matters significantly. Images and CSS files consistently achieve 93–97% hit ratios across all APAC markets with properly configured Cache-Control headers. JavaScript bundles with cache-busting hashes achieve similar ratios. However, HTML documents — even those eligible for CDN caching — typically see only 60–75% hit ratios because of the larger number of unique URLs and shorter TTLs used to balance freshness against performance.

Edge cache sizing. Most CDN providers allocate 2–8 TB of SSD storage per PoP for caching. In high-traffic markets like Japan and India, this capacity fills quickly with popular content, yielding high hit ratios through natural demand patterns. In lower-traffic markets, cache warming strategies become essential: pre-populating edge caches with content that analytics predict will be requested, rather than waiting for the first cache miss to trigger an origin fetch.

Cross-Border Routing Performance

Intra-ASEAN routing remains one of the most significant performance bottlenecks in the region. Traffic between two neighboring ASEAN countries frequently routes through Singapore or Hong Kong rather than taking a direct path. A request from Bangkok to Jakarta, which are approximately 2,300km apart, often traverses a 4,800km path through Singapore, adding 15–25ms of unnecessary latency.

This routing inefficiency stems from economic rather than technical constraints. Direct peering between Thai and Indonesian ISPs has limited commercial incentive given the relatively small bilateral traffic volumes. CDN operators mitigate this by maintaining PoPs in both countries and serving cached content locally, but cache miss traffic still suffers the indirect routing penalty.

China-APAC connectivity presents a special case. Traffic crossing the Chinese border traverses the Great Firewall's inspection infrastructure, adding 30–80ms of processing latency beyond the propagation delay. CDN providers serving Chinese users require in-country PoPs with ICP-licensed infrastructure, which is architecturally separate from their APAC network. Content delivery from Hong Kong to mainland Chinese cities is not a viable substitute: our benchmarks show Hong Kong-to-Shenzhen latency averaging 35ms despite a geographic distance of only 40km, compared to 4ms for domestic Chinese PoP-to-user paths.

The impact of local peering on CDN latency cannot be overstated. In markets where CDN operators peer directly with the top 3 ISPs at a local IX, median TTFB drops by 30–45% compared to transit-based routing. This effect is most visible in Vietnam and Thailand, where recent IX expansion has enabled CDN operators to establish direct peering that previously required routing through Singapore. Deploying CDN infrastructure follows many of the same architectural principles as protocol optimization for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, where reducing round trips has outsized impact on perceived performance.

Performance Optimization Strategies for APAC

PoP placement optimization. The diminishing returns curve for PoPs in APAC is steeper than in North America. Our analysis shows that 8 strategically placed PoPs (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Sydney, Jakarta, Bangkok) capture 82% of APAC users within a 30ms edge radius. Adding 4 more PoPs (Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Chennai) raises coverage to 91%. Beyond 15 PoPs, each additional location improves coverage by less than 1%, unless targeting specific under-served sub-regions.

Protocol selection. HTTP/3 with QUIC delivers its largest performance gains in APAC markets with high mobile traffic and variable network quality. Our benchmarks show HTTP/3 reducing page load times by 15–30% for users on 4G connections in Indonesia and the Philippines, where packet loss rates of 1–3% trigger TCP head-of-line blocking under HTTP/2. In Japan and South Korea, where fiber broadband dominates and packet loss is negligible, HTTP/3 provides minimal improvement over HTTP/2.

Image optimization for variable bandwidth. APAC bandwidth varies by an order of magnitude: from 200+ Mbps averages in South Korea to under 10 Mbps in rural Southeast Asia. Effective APAC CDN configurations use client hints (Sec-CH-Viewport-Width, Sec-CH-DPR) or Accept header negotiation to serve appropriately sized images. AVIF format adoption in APAC is at 68% browser support (led by Chrome's dominance in the region), making it viable for most traffic. Serving AVIF where supported and WebP as fallback reduces image payload by 40–60% compared to JPEG, directly impacting LCP in bandwidth-constrained markets.

Pre-warming strategies. In markets with lower per-PoP traffic, pre-warming is the difference between a 20ms cache hit and an 180ms cache miss on the first request. Effective pre-warming uses analytics data to identify the top 500–1,000 URLs per PoP and refreshes them before their TTL expires. This is particularly important for APAC PoPs in secondary cities (Surabaya, Cebu, Chiang Mai) where organic traffic volume alone may not keep caches warm. The broader architecture of content delivery networks supports these warming patterns through mid-tier cache shields that aggregate traffic from multiple edge locations.

What This Means for Your Team

CDN performance in the Asia-Pacific region defies simple generalization. The 8ms median TTFB in Tokyo and the 105ms in Dhaka represent the same region in name only. Effective APAC CDN strategy requires treating each sub-region as a distinct optimization target: mature markets (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia) where cache hit ratio and protocol optimization drive marginal gains; growth markets (Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia) where domestic PoP placement and local peering deliver transformative improvements; and emerging markets (Indonesia outer islands, Philippines provinces, Bangladesh, Myanmar) where fundamental infrastructure gaps limit what CDN technology alone can achieve.

The data consistently shows that the single highest-impact optimization for APAC is not faster hardware or smarter caching algorithms — it is placing a PoP inside the target country with direct peering to local ISPs. Every other optimization builds on that foundation.