Little help with Cloudflare

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timmmay

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#110909 18-Oct-2012 21:29

I set up Cloudflare this evening, really just wanting to use it as a CDN to accelerate loading of static images on my website - I'm a photographer so there's a lot of them.

I set it up, and the Cloudflare control panel says it's working fine. DNS TTL is 10 minutes, so the DNS change to Cloudflare propogated really quickly. Cloudflare is set up as a basic CDN only, security basically off, minify off (already did that myself to the source files), rocket loader off. I've had problems with the site when I try to combine Javascript so I'm being cautious.

I set up a JMeter script to test the website before and after the change. I ran tests with various levels of caching, to try to emulate a web browser - 4 threads to load static resources, clear cache between runs, each run loads ten pages. In general, the page load time is the same or very slightly slower at around 3000ms including static resources. This is true for all varieties of caching, on, or in between, but when all caching is off the page loads slightly faster on Cloudflare - 3500ms instead of 4100ms without.

I assumed it'd be faster, especially the first view, but also viewing pages that had new static resources.

Can anyone suggest what's going on, or anything to try to work out what's going on? I'd try to ping the Sydney Cloudflare server but I can't find an IP. The ping on the domain name and traceroute are basically the same.

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Amanzi
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#703226 18-Oct-2012 21:44

Is your website hosted in NZ? If so, it would make sense that Cloudflare is slightly slower as you'd be retrieving the images from Sydney and not NZ.

freitasm

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#703230 18-Oct-2012 21:54

There are lots of options on CloudFlare. First make sure the images are in standard formats (jpg, png or gif). IF your server gives images in anything else (streaming, or loading from a script) then CloudFlare won't benefit at all.

If the images are loaded from standard IMG SRC tags then you might want to pay the $20 a month to get access to the image resizing, lazy loading, etc:

You might want to set Caching Level to "Aggresive".

Remember that you're adding hops here. When the browser requests the image it will send the request to SYD, which in turn will send back to your server. This adds up but only for the first request. After this they should have the images in their cache so it's not so bad.

I see cdn.geekzone.co.nz is 150ms from here, while our server is 30ms from here. Because most of our resources will be already cached then it's not much of an impact, but for new sites, or sites with not much traffic it may increase time to NZ viewers without much benefit for you.

Remember, CloudFlare purges the cached versions if not used, which means it won't save much bandwidth for you and actually increase page load times if your site is not busy and constantly pulling stuff out of their servers.

Is your site static? Let them do the minification, don't spend time yourself since they can do it automatically.

If you want, send me a PM and I can have a look on the site.

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timmmay

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#703322 19-Oct-2012 06:22

My website's hosted in the US, with HostGator, ping's around 170ms. I figured if the content was served from Sydney with a 40ms ping the static resources should load faster overall, maybe not hugely, but at least a little. Though I guess pre-parsing of the page before it's completely in and multi threaded fetch probably mitigates this a little.

My site is powered by Wordpress, I have a performance plugin doing minification, object and page caching, etc. As a professional photographer/engineer I have saved my images at the level of size/quality I'd like, they're relatively small, so I don't want Cloudflare resampling them. I don't like lazy loading either, it really annoys me on websites I visit, plus the site uses CSS galleries so it's not simple IMG tags. The free plan has less options overall, I can't resample images if I wanted to. More gains may come from rocket loader and combining js/css, but that's caused problems in the past when the wordpress plugin did it.

I've turned the Cloudflare aggressive caching on, it's made page load times 30-40ms faster. Overall pages are reasonably quick, with a median/average of 1634/964ms now, but min 351ms and max 4832ms (max is page two of my blog with a lot of large images inline, which I'll probably change once testing has finished). Maybe I was just expecting too much. Testing was with JMeter with http caching enabled to emulate a browser, two threads and ten repetitions, the test hitting around eight pages and a few blog posts.

Re Cloudflare purging the cache if it's unused, that could be the case I guess. It got 4000 visitors and 19,000 pages last month, over 100K hits including static resources. It's quiet overnight NZ time, mostly search engines hit it. Traffic is 50% from NZ, 30% from the US, the rest from all over. I have customers from random parts of the world, people often come back to NZ to get married.

I've attached before/after testing results here. Sorry for the size, if I made them smaller it made then unreadable.

As an aside, I work as a performance architect for a large organisation. We focus more on scalibility of systems under high load than individual user response times, mostly because the back end systems are relatively slow. So I have some experience in this area, but not with public CDNs and such. My experience isn't all web either, it's partly web, partly rich client, partly web services, databases, etc. We do get tools like 1TB+ enterprize flash arrays, clustered databases, network acceleration hardware, etc.

I'll PM you thanks Mauricio, interested in thoughts and impressions :)

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#703335 19-Oct-2012 07:31

I had a look and replied with a simple question. Have you actually toggled Cloudflare On (is the site and www both with orange clouds or grey clouds)?

I am getting the site very fast, on TelstraClear, but coming directly from the US still.

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timmmay

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#703336 19-Oct-2012 07:34

I must've set something up incorrectly. Cloudflare has the little green tick by the domain showing it's working. Inside the Cloudflare DNS setup it has a little orange cloud by the domains A and CNAME records, with a value of "points to 96.125.etc", which is the IP address of the USA server.

Can you spot what I'm doing wrong? I appreciate the help :)

freitasm

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#703338 19-Oct-2012 07:36

Ok, I see it's on Cloudflare - it's TelstraClear giving me the old address still. I guess the NS was set at very high TTL.

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timmmay

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#703339 19-Oct-2012 07:38

My DNS servers were set to a TTL of 600 (10 minutes), but I've had trouble with the TC name servers in the past not refreshing properly.

I'll give it a couple of days then try. Thanks for your help :)

As you may recall I live a couple of blocks from you. I should buy you a beer one day :)

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#703342 19-Oct-2012 07:40

I will have a look at little later when I get the proper DNS here. To start with I used this page to fetch the HTML and confirmed it's coming from Cloudflare.

The HTML comes very fast - under a second. The images received a 403 (Denied) though.

Also are you using some plugin in your site to prevent hotlink?

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freitasm

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#703345 19-Oct-2012 07:48

I am sending you a PM on this.

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timmmay

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#703347 19-Oct-2012 07:57

Yes I use hotlink protection. I appreciate your help :)

timmmay

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#703354 19-Oct-2012 08:16

I also seem to have broken my email, either a little or a lot - I'm not sure. Hopefully it's arriving and I can't check it, rather than having it not arrive.

When I log into the hostgator webmail it can't contact the IMAP server. I don't know if I can log into my email directly using IMAP as I'm not at home.

Is there something I need to do with DNS or MX records? Or could it be that HostGator just doesn't like that my DNS now points at Cloudflare and there's some kind of firewall in the way?

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freitasm

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#703356 19-Oct-2012 08:20

How do you get to your email page?

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timmmay

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#703357 19-Oct-2012 08:24

http://webmail.hostgator.com - . At home I just use IMAP from Thunderbird.

I've contacted HostGator support, which is typically excellent. I figured I'd post here as you have a bunch of Cloudflare experience.

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#703358 19-Oct-2012 08:25

It shouldn't have anything to do with the change...

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timmmay

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#703414 19-Oct-2012 10:32

From HostGator.

Unfortunately webmail.hostgator.com will not work for domains that are currently are using Cloudflare's service. The reason for this is, that webmail attempts to connect to the server using wildphotography.co.nz, which in this case is not actually resolving to our servers but Cloudflare's servers.

You can still access access the regular webmail cPanel clients by using (another URL that doesn't work because it's on port 2xxx blocked by my work firewall).

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