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

My concern is more about scaling than raw page speed: of course going through a reverse proxy is going to be slower end-to-end than going directly to heroku. But taking the static asset load off of heroku without a Rube Goldberg CDN deployment is great, IMO: they just leverage standard HTTP caching headers and then those requests rarely if ever hit your dynos, like the old varnish functionality you got with bamboo stack on heroku. It's much more brain dead, which works for me.

I don't use or care much for all the dynamic optimization they offer (I turned it all off) and, with respect to the SSL cert, I don't really care about how it is issued (to a first approximation, no one looks at certs except the browser verifying the cert against the URL) but YMMV.

It does appear that wildcard certs have gotten very cheap now: http://www.namecheap.com/ssl-certificates/comodo.aspx so the cost savings isn't as great as I thought. (Thanks for pointing that out aioprisan.)

I've found that heroku performance thinking is a bit different than raw page speed thinking: my goal in life is to minimize the load on my dynos. I'd be willing to put up with a CDN that was slower serving static assets than heroku is, just to keep the load off the dynos, but I've found CloudFlare to be plenty fast.

Wow, I didn't realize how cheap they had gotten, thanks for pointing that out! I may pick one up just because.

I don't really understand Cloudflare's problems with latency. When using FULL CDN+Optimizations the entire site's HTML and assets should be cached and served super fast via cloudflare. That is the best case scenario for them to speed up load times.

But based on my testing, Cloudflare adds more latency to response times even in a best case scenario of full caching. However, when I do the same exact type of optimizations with Google PageSpeed service I see great results.

The most interesting part about cloudflare's problems is that they weren't there 2 years ago when I first started using it. I blogged about how great it was.

Here are the articles I've written about cloudflare in the past 2 years: http://www.x-pose.org/category/cloudflare/

It's unclear if the tools used (Pingdom/Neustar) put cache-busting headers on their requests. It's likely that they do: such probes are more comparable/reproduceable between runs, and more likely to give guidance to the app-designer/web-designer (as opposed to cache-runner).

If so, of course CloudFlare would be slower in such tests: its largest benefit, caching unchanged resources for subsequent reloads, has been disabled.

Also, it's hard to take performance hints from someone who splits such a short, simple blog post across 6 (!) pages. Six discretionary click-requiring page-loads is always worse than one, and is the easiest thing to fix if you're respecting my reading-time.

I have to wonder about the testing results that were obtained. Testing the improvements of optimizations need to be done carefully; you need to make sure capture sufficient data to draw conclusions.

#1 -> You need to capture enough data samples for each location and browser #2 -> You need to capture data from a set of global locations #3 -> You need to capture data from the commonly used web browsers.

You can see a test run from a single location and browser using one sample (2.873) second for the time to interact.

http://www.websitetest.com/ui/tests/50e89376479876092f000012

but when you run the test over 17 location and run 5 samples for each locations. (6.4) second for the time to interact.

http://www.websitetest.com/ui/tests/50e893d7479876092f000016

There is a big difference between the one location and the multiple locations with 5 samples. Looking at just Washington with 5 samples; the time to interact is (4.1) seconds.

(Disclosure, I work at yottaa.com the provider of websitetest.com) For those people looking to verify optimizations are working (automated or hand-tuned) you should use websitetest.com to simplify the testing process. It makes running tests (multiple locations, multiple browsers, multiple connectivities) possible with one click and test results make it easy to draw conclusions.

--- All test data for the information in the comment is available through these links

Tests by browsers in Washington DC -> http://www.websitetest.com/ui/tests/50e89598479876124100000e