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by RussianCow 1379 days ago
We use Cloudflare Warp at work. Honestly—and I say this as a Cloudflare fan in general—it doesn’t work well for me. I regularly have connection issues with it enabled. Video calls sometimes cut out for a couple seconds, and Tuple (which I use a lot) really struggles with it. It’s possible it’s my internet connection or something unrelated, but I don’t have any of these issues when Warp is disabled. YMMV and all that, so take this as the anecdote it is. For what it’s worth, some coworkers have similar issues, but others don’t, so maybe it’s region specific. (I live in Oregon.)
4 comments

Warp is actually two products: their consumer VPN product, which is typically what's referred to as Warp, and their Zero Trust, which uses the VPN hooks to layer on Enterprise management features. Zero Trust allows companies to route particular IP ranges through various separate connections, unlike Warp which only routes through Cloudflare. It sounds like your company is routing more than internal IP traffic through Zero Trust, which may mean its going through your company connection. You can check your Split Tunnel preferences in the client to see for sure. I personally use various tools with Warp just fine.

However, it's also true that Warp / Zero Trust doesn't use the entire Cloudflare network for their termination points, only a subset of datacenter are used. So you may be getting unlucky through saturation or even just routing to the closest CF point that terminates traffic near you. You can check your "Colocation center" that's being used. In my case, despite living near Detroit and CF's datacenter there, I'm routed through Chicago, adding 40ms to any roundtrip time.

> In my case, despite living near Detroit and CF's datacenter there, I'm routed through Chicago, adding 40ms to any roundtrip time.

This shouldn’t be the case: want to email me (silverlock at cloudflare) the output of https://www.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace and your company’s accountId?

This is stuff we want to address — whether directly in our control and/or where we need to ensure others are peering with us locally to help their users.

I believe the issues with your video calls and Tuple are due to a specific issue we've recently identified. What video call software do you use? Also, Tuple has a troubleshooting screen to see packet loss etc. Would you be willing to share the data from that screen with us? If so, you can reach out to me using my HN username at cloudflare.
We use mostly Google Meet and Slack for calls. If/when I next experience issues, I’ll be sure to reach out!
Interesting, we've used Google Meet quite a lot without issue. But yes do let me know.

The main bit I'm interested in is definitely Tuple, specifically because it has a diagnostic screen (network insights?). When you have a bad experience, I'd love to know what that screen says

Tuple is what I've had the most amount of trouble with. I even contacted Tuple, thinking it was an issue on their end, but they looked at the logs and said it was most likely a VPN connectivity problem, and suggested I try it without Warp enabled, which so far has been seamless. The issues with Google Meet are pretty intermittent and uncommon—it just tends to cut out at rather inconvenient moments. :) The difficult thing about these types of tools is that the bar for what works "well" is really high; even very infrequent connectivity issues are enough to sour one's opinion of the tool.
I have the same sorts of issues on Android -- I frequently have to kill the 1.1.1.1 app because it no longer passes traffic, but it seems to work fine on other Linux systems that are not Android.
Alas not. We use it on our Linux machines with include mode and it's painful. Common domains fail to resolve at all, and can't even SSH to IP addresses on the local network. Every update seems to fix one edge case and add two more. At this point I'd rather just have a VPN and spend the buzzword budget on something else.
The Android issue is an issue, but a separate one. It seems to only happen on a few devices (including mine). What device do you use and on what version of Android?
I'm using it on a Pixel 6 with Android 13.
Same as me then. That's probably part of the issue. Thanks for confirming, I'll let the right team know.
I use it for work as well. I have issues occasionally with it, but overall it's pretty stable. I'm in Michigan.