Did Cloudflare hurt your website's performance?

eva2000

Cheers

I use webpagetest.org and gtmetrix and google pagespeed insights via their respective apis using my tools at https://github.com/centminmod/google-insights-api-tools and can feed the results into my custom pagespeed slack channel as well https://github.com/centminmod/google-insights-api-tools#slack-channel as well as custom google analytic and google data studio dashboards centered around pagespeed metrics exposed by them.

example for mobile Google PageSpeed Insights v4 API (older version) test for google page site

./gitools.sh mobile https://www.google.com origin   

mobile (FAST) 
Test url: origin:https://www.google.com
FCP: 474ms (FAST) DCL: 943ms (FAST)
91.00% pages fast FCP (<1459ms)
5.80% pages average FCP (<2736ms)
3.20% pages slow FCP (>2736ms)
89.40% pages fast DCL (<1940ms)
7.80% pages average DCL (<3874ms)
2.90% pages slow DCL (>3874ms)

example for mobile Google PageSpeed Insights v5 API (current version) test for google page site

./gitools_v5.sh mobile https://www.google.com

mobile CrUX Rating: AVERAGE
Test url: https://www.google.com
FCP: 1666ms (AVERAGE) FID: 204ms (AVERAGE)
76.50% pages fast FCP (<1000ms)
18.30% pages average FCP (<2500ms)
5.10% pages slow FCP (>2500ms)
81.60% pages fast FID (<50ms)
14.60% pages average FID (<250ms)
3.80% pages slow FID (>250ms)

PageSpeed Insights v5 Score (mobile): 93 (fast)
Lighthouse Version: 4.1.0
Total-Page-Size: 321 KB
First-Contentful-Paint: 930
First-Meaningful-Paint: 975
Speed-Index: 930
First-CPU-Idle: 3789
Time-to-Interactive: 4359
Estimated-Input-Latency: 168
Time-To-First-Byte: 90 ms

JavaScript-execution-time: 1.3 s
URL  Total  Script-Evaluation  Script-Parse
https://www.google.com/xjs/_/js/k=xjs.qs.pt_BR.QkZpjSizbzo.O/m=sx,ByqdBd,CiVnBc,Fkg7bd,HcFEGb,OF7gzc,QfiAub,RMhBfe,T4BAC,Uox2uf,bct,cdos,czrJpf,hsm,if1iFc,jsa,kopZwe,lXXCK,qim,uz938c,vWNDde,ws9Tlc,xPR7tc,xpltpb,yQ43ff,d,csi/am=GACAReKXmdEhZIC6ACjhMLD1AghOkJAeAQ/rt=j/d=1/dg=2/rs=ACT90oGrqtAh5CsLyxKi3cOCjzZKUvH2AQ                                                                                                      775.19  454.76  282.86
https://www.google.com/                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        250.73  204.64  44.49
https://www.google.com/xjs/_/js/k=xjs.qs.pt_BR.QkZpjSizbzo.O/am=GACAReKXmdEhZIC6ACjhMLD1AghOkJAeAQ/rt=j/d=1/exm=sx,ByqdBd,CiVnBc,Fkg7bd,HcFEGb,OF7gzc,QfiAub,RMhBfe,T4BAC,Uox2uf,bct,cdos,czrJpf,hsm,if1iFc,jsa,kopZwe,lXXCK,qim,uz938c,vWNDde,ws9Tlc,xPR7tc,xpltpb,yQ43ff,d,csi/ed=1/dg=2/rs=ACT90oGrqtAh5CsLyxKi3cOCjzZKUvH2AQ/m=sb_wiz,aa,abd,async,dmp,dvl,foot,mUpTid,mu,sf,sonic,spch,rQSi2,xz7cCd,fEVMic,WgDvvc?xjs=s1  204.32  135.20  67.87
https://www.gstatic.com/og/_/js/k=og.mob.en_US.fDfR4j6TJvY.O/rt=j/m=md/exm=mih,mab,meb/d=1/ed=1/rs=AA2YrTuqJfmoxdqVz0SwT9ndNSL34efw7Q                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          73.60   43.52   28.86

These test results then can be sent to my custom pagespeed slack channel too.

datanoise

Awesome, thanks!

Nightwalker90

That is really interesting. I also use CF for some of my sites (not all). And for especially one I always thought "why the hell is this site ranked so bad, because I am doing everything that it should getting better and better". But it could definitely be the Problem from IP Pool or Blacklisted neighbour what you are describing here.

Really good comments, which I did not see before. Will definitely look around if it is not better to move away for those sites from CF! Thank you!

@bountysite said:
I am a huge fan of CF, for what they have built. Like the idea and system design for scale.

But, I too have encountered some issues with CF. I am pretty sure that they did not see these coming.

• IP Pool problem - You may have a rocking site and good content and traffic, but if your neighbor site is poor, it will affect your site reputation. So, CF does affect ranking, especially with free bucket.
• Blacklisted neighbor - I was on free pool, but another site was hacked and blacklisted. This caused my mails to get dropped(not even marked as spam). Again, same IP pool problem.
• Slowness - I have a static site which does indeed appears slow. I was under the impression that CF is probably fetching fresh content from actual server. But overtime, I find that this is not the case.

CF uses ECMP to route traffic within the datacenter. I am not sure how the server decides which server to contact to get cached contents and apply page rules for that site. I think they set some cookie which decides where to go for subsequent requests. This internal process may have slowed down.

May be CF has hit a scaling limit. I moved to paid version, and stripped off several firewall rules, but still find site slow by 1-2seconds.

• Security concern - I am not comfortable with CF sitting in-between two SSL transactions. I am sure they wont, but they can intercept username/passwords.

I am seriously considering to move out CF. Is bunnycdn any better?

Hopefully with akamai acquisition, they will start churning out free plans, and make paid plans better.