While this blog post has very little in the way of proof, we actually got screwed over by CF a few weeks back. Basically, one morning all requests started being slow: small responses would take 7 seconds (within a few milliseconds, if you accounted for the RTT to the edge) with 7 seconds TTFB, larger ones (not sure exactly what the threshold was, but it was hundreds of KiB, not MiB) would take 1 minute (again, almost…
Hmm, we've been experiencing vastly reduced throughput as well (something like 100 kB/s on images >100 kB in size, cache hit). We're on the free plan, though. Makes me wonder if there's actually some throttling going on behind the scenes.
I am talking internally with the customer support team about what happened to this customer's traffic. It is definitively not the case that doing "four requests per minute" gets you rate limited.
While we are on the subject of rate limiting and such, does Cloudflare allow using its service for serving video files for a media heavy social media app where we store the videos on Backblaze B2? I’m working on such an app, and am hoping to use Cloudflare + Backblaze B2, because of the bandwidth alliance. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ However, the Terms of Service say: > 2.8 Limitation on Serv…
I basically have something similar to your use-case. While I'm on the free tier for all my domains, the supplemental agreement, at least in the US version, removes the specific limitation to serve primarily html/text content if you enable Cloudflare Workers, which also has a free tier, applies on an account and not domain level, and has no requirement for you to serve your content through their KV system. I ended up paying for my CF Workers subscription for a different project on my account but the system worked fine prior to that. I served 111GB of a combination of m4a and png files in data from my B2 bucket via CF in the past month.
I am talking internally with the customer support team about what happened to this customer's traffic. It is definitively not the case that doing "four requests per minute" gets you rate limited.
I think it might also be worth considering whether returning 503 is the right response when rate limited. 5xx indicates server failure, a "429 Rate Limited" is a more appropriate response.
4xx is a client error and 429 indicates that particular client is making too many requests. 5xx is a server error and 503 says the service itself is unavailable irrespective of the client’s actions. In this particular case it’d be unavailable for contractual rather than technical reasons, but it’s still the right status
While this blog post has very little in the way of proof, we actually got screwed over by CF a few weeks back. Basically, one morning all requests started being slow: small responses would take 7 seconds (within a few milliseconds, if you accounted for the RTT to the edge) with 7 seconds TTFB, larger ones (not sure exactly what the threshold was, but it was hundreds of KiB, not MiB) would take 1 minute (again, almost…
Hmm, we've been experiencing vastly reduced throughput as well (something like 100 kB/s on images >100 kB in size, cache hit). We're on the free plan, though. Makes me wonder if there's actually some throttling going on behind the scenes.
I can only comment on our exact situation, where the response times were as I mentioned them, exactly. I've not experienced that, but I guess it's worth shooting a question to support (though, expect several days on the free plan)
While we are on the subject of rate limiting and such, does Cloudflare allow using its service for serving video files for a media heavy social media app where we store the videos on Backblaze B2? I’m working on such an app, and am hoping to use Cloudflare + Backblaze B2, because of the bandwidth alliance. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ However, the Terms of Service say: > 2.8 Limitation on Serv…
I basically have something similar to your use-case. While I'm on the free tier for all my domains, the supplemental agreement, at least in the US version, removes the specific limitation to serve primarily html/text content if you enable Cloudflare Workers, which also has a free tier, applies on an account and not domain level, and has no requirement for you to serve your content through their KV system. I ended up…
Video is really not allowed in the TOS for Cloudflare Workers either, see this discussion about the topic:
There's no scarier company online than Cloudflare. Blissfully allowing it to MITM your traffic is just swell. In this case I suspect the monetization algo kicked in. Considering it just produced $40/month, it did well.
> There's no scarier company online than Cloudflare.
Really? I don't think you're aware of what's actually out there.
Let's put it this way: Cloudflare has a straightforward business model. The fact that you can pay them is comforting. The big shady companies that you cannot even pay, yet still make money "somehow", are more scary.
Cloudflare might have other issues from time to time, but I've never experienced the similar problem. I'm running around 40 domains on Cloudflare Free plan. About 20 of these domains have some traffic.
>but I've never experienced the similar problem.
How do you know for sure that you didn't? One of the main takeaways from the original article is that these errors are invisible from server side (your own stack) because it's the traffic is being throttled before it gets to your own servers.
Unless you have very good and consistent client side availability metrics you probably wouldn't notice the 2%-3% drop.
While we are on the subject of rate limiting and such, does Cloudflare allow using its service for serving video files for a media heavy social media app where we store the videos on Backblaze B2? I’m working on such an app, and am hoping to use Cloudflare + Backblaze B2, because of the bandwidth alliance. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ However, the Terms of Service say: > 2.8 Limitation on Serv…
They do NOT allow video or large files (+50MB) on the Free plan or even on the paid plans! You'll have to get an Enterprise account for that (it's no longer starting at $5K/mo, you can get custom accounts setup to match your needs).
They do have a separate offering for video streaming which is pay as you go.
One gotcha for CloudFlare is that I find they will serve CAPTCHA pages for asset requests (like JavaScript or CSS) which will break your site (obviously the user won't see the captcha when the browser was expecting JS or an image).
To avoid this you need to turn the firewall and security feats to "Essentially Off" at least for asset requests (you can do this partial blocking via a page rule).
That being said this doesn't seem to be an issue with Free vs Paid, just a general problem with their blocking.
They do NOT allow video or large files (+50MB) on the Free plan or even on the paid plans! You'll have to get an Enterprise account for that (it's no longer starting at $5K/mo, you can get custom accounts setup to match your needs).
They do have a separate offering for video streaming which is pay as you go. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
It's not compatible with Cloudflare Workers afaik.