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CloudFlare slowing down response times?
lukelarris
Member
Yo,
So I've had an issue with all my sites that I run, all of which have their domains running through CloudFlare, but they're on different hosts, one is a small shared host, and the other is a VPS I'm gradually migrating to.
The issue I've been having is that when I refresh a page over and over again, sometimes it will take a while to connect, and it was just sluggish to connect in general. On the shared host I could totally understand that, but on my shiny new VPS with barely anything running on it this just shouldn't have been happening, so I decided to pause CloudFlare on my domains, wait 10 minutes, and then see what happens.
And holy crap, things are a lot snappier now on both the sites on my shared host and the sites on my VPS.
I don't have proof of the performance increase, I'm going by what seems faster to me, and it's quite a noticeable increase in speed.
Has anybody else who uses CloudFlare tried this? Did pausing CloudFlare on your domain improve things at all? (remember to wait 10 minutes)
Really curious to see if it's just me.
Comments
Cloudflare free plans are not really speeding up your websites, the free nodes are crappy and quite often under heavy attacks. Network routing are not optimized as good as you would wish.
News to me. I remember when I first joined it made a noticeable increase in speed, but I guess things have gotten stale.
I think I am speaking too definitive, but I have over 10 websites hosted under their different nameservers, and most of them perform poorly due to packet loss to the node, etc. I think the main reason is their free nodes are often under attack.
It was good at the beginning, but more free users = less performance.
The are indeed slow and have issues a lot. But they can also offload a lot of traffic.
The spikes/high load is when I disable CloudFlare.
The thing is, they usually do 50-60 paid plans for every 1000-2000 free ones on each node. It's not really a "paid node versus free node" thing, they're the same damn nodes.
@jimaek Interesting graph. I guess I should keep my domains on CloudFlare but only enable CloudFlare when traffic gets too high, at least until or if they come up with some brilliant solution to the problems.
Also check this out http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/02/how-much-traffic-is-too-much-traffic-for-cloudflare
The guy offloaded 100TB per month on their free account.
Actually pretty sure the business level is on seperate routes, As it has a 2500% SLA agreement which they wouldn't want impacted by free users, However its a $200 a month option so only viable for business's
Holy shit, that's incredible.
@vpssimon that makes sense, but as you said that's only viable for businesses. Oh well, I guess a 'free' CDN was going to be eventually too good to be true one way or another.
Well yeah, business and enterprise nodes are on different nodes probably, but that's not the point I was making.
I'm saying the "Free" and "Professional" tiers are on the same nodes.
Sometimes, depend on the route. I have a Chinese blog on appfog singapore node, and when i enable cloudflare i go through node in los angeles, that is a big slowdown.
I don't like cloudflare really, and personally don't use it. However some of my clients use it, and it saves my servers about 40TB of traffic a month, (Cloudflare send weekly emails)
I like the savings it gives you, but if that means adding 3-7 seconds to page load time, it's not worth it to me unless I'm running out of bandwidth regularly.
I used CF when they were younger, and liked the platform(free account) until about 2 and a half years ago or so. At the time, it seemed most of my CF powered sites were offline at some time, and I would get too many calls from clients and biz partners about theirs sites being offline "with a CF page being shown". I also noticed great changes in performance and stability -- one minute your site is fine, the next page click and you see a "CF error page" -- At that point I decided to use other methods to keep these sites online, and dropped CF completely. I am sure the free account, as others have said, are on over loaded nodes and it's showing at times I suppose, with latency and slower load times.
I am using cloudflare pro plan for one of e-commerce sites.Do anyone here have any experience that business plan is any better than pro plan, performance/anycast optimization wise ?
From reading the thread, there's a theory that Pro accounts are on the same nodes as free accounts, so there's still the issue that free accounts have with the response times.
Actually i do not want to spend $200 to clarify if business plans are hosted on different nodes and any better and do not trust sales team's probably wrong statements about this kind of technical details.
@imperio Considering starting with the business plan it starts to include a
100% uptime guarantee
I would assume it has to be better in some way.
Includes raingun as well as well as better security
Hmm is this a new feature? I don't remember seeing it.
@fliphost neat! it is for pro only isnt it? I think $200 montly is a lot
@netomx no, Enterprise only.
Pro is $20
Business is $200
Enterprise starts at $3000
@Fliphost they should add a LET price
haha
@netomx that would be called the free plan :P
I have contacted cloudflare and let them know this thread.I am sure matthew is interested in this kind of technical discussions so lets wait for clarification.
I wonder if they'd be willing to announce a full hosting provider's netblock.
@Rallias Perhaps, though don't they only proxy certain ports?
https://support.cloudflare.com/entries/22031641-Which-ports-will-CloudFlare-work-with-
Though with the enterprise plan they may have more flexibility
Yeah, but that's just on the free and 20/mo plans. I'd imagine they provide a different level of service to the $200+/mo plan payers.
@Rallias Would be interesting to see what they say
There really was no need to go tattle to CloudFlare about this, they've probably already been aware of this thread since half an hour after it was posted. In case you didn't know, they're like ninjas on anything that has the term "cloudflare" in it.
I am curious about Matthew's response but I really doubt there's much they can do (or should do) because I'm not paying a cent for this, so why should they cater to my needs and shave off extra seconds even though I don't pay them?
Because if they fix the few second issue with your site, it may propogate similar benefits to their paid users.