Comment by hnav

TLDR, adding an "edge" in front of your application incurs a connection setup cost which can be 2-3x RTT and is especially noticeable when you don't have a large QPS and are in a region like APAC where geographically close networks often have high latencies between each other. Both Argo and OriginShield seem to pool more aggressively, often going cross-datacenter to avoid hitting origin which sometimes saves this setup cost by coalescing onto warm connections, but only sometimes (notice how spiky their Argo graphs are, the p90 request is probably no faster than before).