u/modelop

Logbook from weeks of fine-tuning pfSense. Weeks, not years, tips welcomed.

Sharing a small tool I wrote after a recent debugging session. Posting here in case it's useful to anyone else.

Background: I had an intermittent issue where requests through the MIA colo on my zones were slow (2-14s TTFB on uncached/DYNAMIC requests), while EWR and other colos were fast. Cached HITs were fine across the board, and other zones on the same origin server were unaffected.

Enabling Argo Smart Routing made the problem disappear instantly, but Argo isn't viable as a permanent fix on every zone for personal projects.

The hardest part of opening a support ticket for this kind of issue is proving it. MTRs show the network is fine. One-off curl tests are buried in headers and only catch a moment in time. What I needed was a continuous log showing the colo on every request so I could switch VPN locations mid-test and demonstrate the colo-specific timing change in one stream.

So this small bash script outputs one line per request: timestamp, colo, cache status, TTFB, total time, CF-Ray ID. Ctrl+C prints a per-colo summary with avg/min/max TTFB. You can also pass a count to auto-stop after N requests.

Useful for:

• Comparing colo performance via VPN switching
• Demonstrating routing issues to support with a clean continuous log
• Watching cache HIT vs DYNAMIC behavior across edges
• Tracing CF-Ray IDs over time

Open to feedback or PRs if anyone has ideas to improve it.