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

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

#31

Post by secure »

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…

off-topic: Since you obviously are interested in Unicode (you used • and even ␄), you could continue the trend by using ¹, ² and ³ instead of [1], [2] and [3]. For the corresponding explanation at the bottom, use ①, ② and ③. Also, instead of "worst case", write “worst case” (typographically correct quotation marks) and instead of ', write ’ (typographically correct apostrophe).

In case anyone wonders how to enter them efficiently, I use neo-layout.org which provides ¹ on Mod3+1, ① with Multi_key + ( + 1 + ), “ with Shift+9, ” with Shift+0 and ’ with Mod3+0.

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

#32

Post by thematt »

jakobe wrote: post #26

I stopped using Cloudflare because of their "protection service". They would block certain visitors, seemingly by random, and present them with a captcha. The page presenting the captcha had big ads on them. There's no way that it's acceptable to show ads and captchas to potential customers, before they can even see my website.

Were you on the free or paid plan?

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

#33

Post by blakefrost »

carsongross wrote: post #18

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 (hundred…

My experience with CloudFlare couldn't be more to the contrary.

We rolled it out for a good few months and gave them quite a while to get their act straight. Ultimately, we had to do an emergency switch to another CDN because the performance was SOOOOOO bad and we had an important event occurring the following day (Not the ideal time to be playing with DNS on a production website).

The Theory behind CloudFlare makes sense right? They'll protect you from DDOS by getting everyone onto their network, so the network gets so big no one can take it down and they have specialized equipment and techniques. Well, maybe that makes sense if you have a problem with DDOS, but if you don't, why join a network that is obviously being DDOS every day? That doesn't make much sense to me. I assume they were being DDOS'd because every time they went down, taking us with them, that's what they would said on twitter.

The worse part was response times. With them, individual assets where taken around 500ms to 800ms to load. Once we switched to another service provider, we were seeing around 20ms-30ms. And if it's not already obvious, dynamic pages served off Heroku are faster if they're not stuck behind CloudFlare. Our total cold page load time when from 5s-6s down to 2s with this switch.

Also, all the asset rewriting and page optimization magic is so silly IMOHO. Just use a good framework like ROR with Asset Pipeline and write good code and you won't have that problem. Not like for a small site it should be much of a problem, and for a big site, they should have competent programmers and adequate resources.

Also the SSL Cert they give you sucks. It will have a bunch of other companies names on it, and perhaps besides allowing you to rollout SSL very quickly and easily, doesn't do much in the way of validating your identity.

I wish CloudFlare luck, and hopefully they will fix their issues. Until then, I'm staying away from them.

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

#34

Post by xpose2000 »

X-Istence wrote: post #23
jws wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be more interesting if it stayed on the page for more than 200ms. Displays, then goes white in Safari. Chrome is fine.

Authors site has this in the tag after javascript has run ...: style="margin-left: -32767px; " Not sure why that is there, or what use it has. In Chrome for some reason an empty style tag is applied to the tag, it too flashes to white and then back, so I assume some JavaScript is adding the margin-left and then removing it. --- Some quick testing ... may not be accurate: It seems that the *-blink.js stuff that comes…

The blog is using google pagespeed service with prioritize content caching enabled. blink.js helps render the page faster. I had no idea rendering was broken in Safari. I just hard coded margin-left: 0 !important as a temporary fix.

Thanks for pointing this out!

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

#35

Post by rgrieselhuber »

thematt wrote: post #32
jakobe wrote: post #26

I stopped using Cloudflare because of their "protection service". They would block certain visitors, seemingly by random, and present them with a captcha. The page presenting the captcha had big ads on them. There's no way that it's acceptable to show ads and captchas to potential customers, before they can even see my website.

Were you on the free or paid plan?

It shouldn't matter though. They are visiting your site...

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

#37

Post by bgentry »

jakobe wrote: post #26

I stopped using Cloudflare because of their "protection service". They would block certain visitors, seemingly by random, and present them with a captcha. The page presenting the captcha had big ads on them. There's no way that it's acceptable to show ads and captchas to potential customers, before they can even see my website.

Can't you disable any of the features you don't want? I agree that it's tacky to have ads on this page, but what would you expect if you're on the free service?

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

#38

Post by jamies »

carsongross wrote: post #18

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 (hundred…

Carson, I'm in the exact same boat as you and it's served us really well. I'm using CloudFlare only to cache my static assets for a Node.js app and I've seen performance in Heroku (and NodeJitsu) go up as a result. I've also added some subdomains to CloudFlare so I'm sharding my static assets (cdn1.mysitecdn.com, cdn2.mysitecdn.com). Add in that all of the assets are Gzipped and SSL secured and I'm a very happy camper. My app on 3 dynos can handle 1000+ concurrent users/sec no problem.

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

#39

Post by Sami_Lehtinen »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #22

This article/site appears to be down. Cannot help but wonder if it wouldn't be if they had used CloudFlare... Jokes aside, I never really expected that CloudFlare would increase the speed of your average site. I mean there is limited caching going on but in general that isn't the benefit of a CDN. The benefit of a CDN is: consistent speed across geographical zones (Europe, Americas, Asia, Russia, etc), better handlin…

CDN doesn't help at all, if it is based on caching only (like CloudFlare). In some cases http headers prevent all benefits of having cdn. Like pages with no-store, no-cache, post&precheck=0. In these cases CDN might only add latency.

I have seen sites hosting images with those headers too. (like Google sites). If you're using slower network connection it becames painfully apparent that all images are always completely redownloaded. With these parameters images must be downloaded from the source, or otherwise caching cdn would break things. Other cdn networks like coral cache clearly states that they always cache content, what ever headers say... But it isn't acceptable for all sites.

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