IP lookup tool is slow?

Hey everyone,

We recently launched our simple web tool, "What is my City Name," which provides quick IP lookup and geolocation data. Initially, things were great, and we saw a good spike in users, which was awesome! However, we're starting to get feedback about noticeable latency, especially for users outside our primary hosting region. This is really impacting the user experience for our core IP lookup feature, which is supposed to be fast and seamless.

It seems our current IP Geolocation API calls are taking way too long, leading to timeouts for some users. Here’s a snippet from our logs showing the kind of delays we're seeing:

[2023-10-27 14:35:01] INFO: User IP: 185.123.45.67 (Germany)
[2023-10-27 14:35:01] INFO: Geolocation API call started...
[2023-10-27 14:35:04] WARN: Geolocation API call took 3.01s for IP 185.123.45.67
[2023-10-27 14:35:04] INFO: Result: City: Berlin, Country: Germany
---
[2023-10-27 14:36:10] INFO: User IP: 203.0.113.1 (Australia)
[2023-10-27 14:36:10] INFO: Geolocation API call started...
[2023-10-27 14:36:15] ERROR: Geolocation API call timed out after 5.00s for IP 203.0.113.1
[2023-10-27 14:36:15] INFO: Fallback to default location.

So, my main question is: how can we optimize our infrastructure and code to significantly speed up this IP lookup and geolocation process? I'm open to all suggestions!

Specifically, I'm really keen to hear about:

• Effective caching strategies for geolocation data.
• Using CDNs or distributed server architecture for better global reach.
• Recommendations for faster, more reliable IP Geolocation APIs (if our current one is the bottleneck).
• Any server-side optimizations (e.g., database indexing, specific hosting configurations) that might help.

Any insights or advice you guys have would be amazing. Help a brother out please...