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.

#51

Post by ciderpunx » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 9:20 PM UTC

Not used CloudFlare myself. I am guessing that the results are much closer with a dynamically generated php site with response headers set to "Cache-Control: max_age=1" (as is sh42.com) than they would be with something static and cacheable like, say, a flat html page. The main benefit will be that images, js and such get cached, but the poster says that the sites are vanilla (hence probably light on images and such) or already quite well optimized (with yslow and such).

I've had good success with apc for locally caching php code; I bet that would have made a much bigger difference than a CDN like cloudflare for the use cases described.

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

#52

Post by mje__ » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 9:23 PM UTC

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.

Yeah, at one stage about 2 years ago they blocked the whole of South Africa, because most web traffic comes from a small number of transparent proxies from each ISP (bandwidth is pretty scarce here). Incredibly irritating

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

#53

Post by jakobe » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 9:42 PM UTC

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?

I was on the free plan. I didn't see any reason to pay for the service, because the free plan had everything I wanted. It seemed too good to be true. Until I saw that captcha page. I was surprised, as I had read all the docs, and it was nowhere mentioned that ads would be shown by cloudflare to my customers. Made me feel amateurish. I immediately deactivated cloudflare and decided to be more careful with 'free' services in the future.

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

#54

Post by saurik » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 9:53 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #43

I'm not surprised he got these results. While the author raises some valid points there are a lot of flaws with this. He doesn't say what the times are for. Is it the time to DOM ready? To the page completely loaded and rendered? Did he load each site at least once before running the tests to make sure CF's caches were primed? CloudFlare can make your site faster or slower depending on how you use it and what you're…

> Since it's a proxy response times will be higher for dynamic content it needs to fetch (the page itself, unless it's cacheable).

This is actually not true; I mean, it might very well be true for CloudFlare (as they may be doing something exceedingly stupid at the edge, might have bad connectivity for their servers far from the trunk, etc.), but it does not follow in general: due to how TCP works, there are numerous advantages to both throughput and latency from adding an intelligent middle-man. For reference:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823268

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4203371

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

#55

Post by andypants » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 10:20 PM UTC

If you are going to make these tests, you need to write how you tested, what you tested with, how many times you tested and exactly what you are measuring...

There is basically no information there except some load times, which we are supposed to just take your word for. Even the load times are unclear about what is included in that time, and if they are aggregated values or not.

Also, don't paginate it over so many pages. You aren't even running any ads, so there's no point.

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

#56

Post by Falkvinge » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 10:29 PM UTC

This article misses the point entirely.

CloudFlare doesn't shine on single page loads. CloudFlare shines when your site hits Reddit's front page, you have 1000 people online at the same time, and your servers are already pumping 30 megabits per second of data of content to visitors.

Source: I hit Reddit's front page a couple of times a month. Before I used CloudFlare, my servers would die. Now, they idle leisurely at loads 1.0 to 2.0 when that happens.

Cheers, Rick

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

#57

Post by andypants » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 10:30 PM UTC

milkman wrote: post #40

Am I the only one who appreciates the work he did to bring us these findings? I've tried Cloudflare before and "underwhelmed" would be as good a description as any. I don't know if it helped at all. If anything, this post confirms it.

The work? He didn't bring us any findings. He brought us ambiguous 'load times' with barely any information except that the numbers under the cloudflare section are sometimes slightly larger than the numbers under the non-cloudflare section.

Actually, I just took another look at the post. The lack of detail is because his 'tools' are just free web services like pingdom. There are no more details about his method on the blog because nobody knows how these businesses make their measurements, as they are closed source.

Exactly what is included in the load times? How many values are aggregated in the load times? Are the times averaged or aggregated in some other way? Were the websites consistent in terms of cache in each of the measurements? Etc.

Scientific method, please! Or at least, a bit more effort.

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

#58

Post by teflonhook » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 11:15 PM UTC

This article is nothing but an advertisement for WebHostingBuzz

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

#59

Post by kristianp » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 11:56 PM UTC

Two annoying usability flaws about this website (for me).

1. The article is over 6 pages, each page is too small. 1 - 3 pages would be preferable. There are no next/previous page links, which would provide a larger area to click. There are no print or 'all pages' options. Nice would be a keyboard shortcut to go to the next page.

2. The Olark chat box is positioned right over the main text, which makes it very distracting. There is no option to close it. It would be preferable though if I didn't have to close it, and it was in an area of the page where I could just ignore it. This is a problem with many websites these days, where the user has to find and click a close button in order to use the website.

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

#60

Post by driverdan » Sun, Jan 06, 2013, 5:25 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #54

driverdan wrote: post #43

I'm not surprised he got these results. While the author raises some valid points there are a lot of flaws with this. He doesn't say what the times are for. Is it the time to DOM ready? To the page completely loaded and rendered? Did he load each site at least once before running the tests to make sure CF's caches were primed? CloudFlare can make your site faster or slower depending on how you use it and what you're…

> Since it's a proxy response times will be higher for dynamic content it needs to fetch (the page itself, unless it's cacheable). This is actually not true; I mean, it might very well be true for CloudFlare (as they may be doing something exceedingly stupid at the edge, might have bad connectivity for their servers far from the trunk, etc.), but it does not follow in general: due to how TCP works, there are numerous…

Interesting point. This will be dependent on the site receiving significant traffic will it not? If the CDN node you go through doesn't have an open connection it will be slower. If that CDN node isn't getting new traffic it's going to close it. It's only going to hold that connection for a reasonable length of time.