Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really. • Hacker News Board

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#11

Post by druiid » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

CDN's are not magic, neither are proxy services. Cloudflare is a proxy service which is able to do the following things for you:

Distribute load around the world, when if you're not a massively large site like Facebook you will only have one, maybe two points of presence. Protect you from DDoS attacks if someone decides they don't like you. As long as you set proper caching rules for ALL your static content (keyword: ALL), there is a decent chance that your bandwidth usage will drop in half or more... the list goes on.

I can't comment on this particular test as the page is down (Guess probably they should be using a proxy service or CDN...), but if it's anything like the previous report of Cloudflare slowness, it was light on science and high on personal thoughts.

Edit: It appears that this page was using a shared hosting provider called Netfirms? Probably shouldn't do that and then post to HN front-page...

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#12

Post by nwh » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

jws wrote: post #5

This is a small test[1] that shows the absence of miracles. My interpretation is: • Location, location, location. – Sometimes cloudflare will have better positioning than your server. In this test the Amsterdam clients benefit significantly compared to his Atlanta Georgia US based server. • It is not magic. – For the content he is using (base installs of popular packages and highly web optimized site) cloudflare's co…

Could it be that your denial of service attack is a misconfiguration somewhere? I had a similar issue at one point, a typo in someone's DNS meant that my private server got absolutely wiped out by junk requests.

I've heard of people using simple load testers like http://loadimpact.com/ to test dynamic pages, though I've not had a serious use for one yet. That's probably as far as you can get without hiring a botnet yourself.

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#13

Post by redegg » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 4:42 PM UTC

CloudFlare speeds up your site in its current state.

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#14

Post by oellegaard » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 4:45 PM UTC

redegg wrote: post #13

CloudFlare speeds up your site in its current state.

Certainly, I cannot access the site at all.

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#15

Post by mscarborough » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 4:48 PM UTC

I can barely read this article but from what I can see so far, it's missing the point. This author is not even doing the basics like combining CSS and JS, much less minifying that, and the site cannot take a traffic spike.

This page requires 42 requests for me, many of which are to dh42.com ... it may not be a big difference when you throw 25 requests at it but if you're serving any real traffic (as this HN traffic spike is clearly demonstrating), you're just sabotaging yourself. On some sites I've consulted with, just turning on KeepAlive and combining resources where possible is enough to get them to the next level, without resorting to a CDN. The difference between 40 requests to your box per page and 5 is pretty significant with any real load.

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#16

Post by jakozaur » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 4:53 PM UTC

I would expect that serving huge static files is a best use case for CDNs and that is where you could score major performance gain.

Moreover, IMO dealing 100 ms latency for ability to survive HN/reddit traffic is a good trade-off.

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#17

Post by sabat » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:01 PM UTC

My site is wildly faster with CloudFlare. As with everything, YMMV.

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#18

Post by carsongross » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:08 PM UTC

If you are fronting a heroku-based app on their cedar platform and have rails (or whatever) serving up static resources CloudFlare is a no brainer: you free up your dyno's to handle the dynamic stuff, and it's a few config-clicks to get it going, with no crazy asset deployment steps.

Additionally, for the cost of just Heroku's SSL endpoint per month, CloudFlare will effectively issue you a wild-card SSL cert (hundreds of dollars a year) and provide SSL service.

Add on top of that the CDN and the DDOS-mitigation features... Well, suffice to say, I love CloudFlare.

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#19

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:18 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Does CloudFlare really speed up your site? Tests say not really.

#20

Post by lucb1e » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:20 PM UTC

sabat wrote: post #17

My site is wildly faster with CloudFlare. As with everything, YMMV.

For slow websites, caching helps a lot. Cloudflare does caching. My page generation times are around 15ms so for me there wasn't a measurable difference when using Cloudflare.