How To Achieve ~90% Cache Hit Ratio On Cloudflare?

EthanZou

Hello everyone!
How to achieve a high cache hit ratio with Cloudflare Free Plan?
Is it possible? and how did you do it all?
Thanks in advance!

Levi

What do you need to cache? Images? Read this fascinating story: https://chevereto.com/community/threads/banned-from-cloudflare-image-hosting-against-tos.12383/ and read CF ToS.

m4nu

Wondering the same. Hit ratio on Bunny is usually 95% or more. Even for less popular files. CF maybe 60% or less.

This always made me wonder why everyone puts their small website behind CF. If it still fetches files from the origin, as CF won't cache the site unless it's getting lots of traffic.

duckeeyuck

@m4nu said: Wondering the same. Hit ratio on Bunny is usually 95% or more. Even for less popular files. CF maybe 60% or less.

Because not all visits had a non-expired cache of your site?
you people can actually develop a cookie tracker and get statistics on this ezpz

EthanZou

@LTniger said:
What do you need to cache? Images? Read this fascinating story: https://chevereto.com/community/threads/banned-from-cloudflare-image-hosting-against-tos.12383/ and read CF ToS.

Thanks, sir
I just found that my site is always in miss status with cloudflare cache.

EthanZou

@m4nu said: CF won't cache the site unless it's getting lots of traffic.

Oh, I see. That's why. Thanks!

EthanZou

As to Browser Cache TTL, which one is better? 4 hours or a month? and why?

kidrock

Try this plugin. They claim it is an alternative to Cloudflare's paid APO.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-cloudflare-page-cache/

EthanZou

@kidrock said:
Try this plugin. They claim it is an alternative to Cloudflare's paid APO.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-cloudflare-page-cache/

Thanks!
Any advise for Laravel?

bench

@m4nu said: This always made me wonder why everyone puts their small website behind CF

For me, cloudflare is primarily about security and DNS, and only then caching

Levi

@bench said:

@m4nu said: This always made me wonder why everyone puts their small website behind CF

For me, cloudflare is primarily about security and DNS, and only then caching

Everything in free plan, except dns feature, is an illusion which bears null advantage for small sites.

bench

@LTniger said: Everything in free plan, except dns feature, is an illusion which bears null advantage for small sites.

it is enough if you know how to configure, block bots, scanners, unnecessary spiders, certain asn, configure captcha for certain pages, etc.

EthanZou

@LTniger said:

@bench said:

@m4nu said: This always made me wonder why everyone puts their small website behind CF

For me, cloudflare is primarily about security and DNS, and only then caching

Everything in free plan, except dns feature, is an illusion which bears null advantage for small sites.

Hmm, why?

EthanZou

https://blog.polyhaven.com/how-we-handle-80tb-and-5m-page-views-a-month-for-under-400/

Cached (orange) vs uncached asset downloads
Total 80TB a month with cloudflare

JasonM

• use full page cache, that is, cache everything.
• use cf workers to cache and it only hits origin if the resource is not available in cache.
• use tiered-caching feature as "ON"
• on your html/php page, use cache-control header, s-maxage=xxxxxxxxxxx (seconds in month or year) so that the middle cache, like cdn, caches it for longest time as specified.
• remove etag/timestamp headers from html.

desperand

@JasonM said:

I've started to write my long story.
But JasonM did it very compact and good.
I just can add few cents, For more information check:
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/about/default-cache-behavior/

eDigital

@LTniger said:

@bench said:

@m4nu said: This always made me wonder why everyone puts their small website behind CF

For me, cloudflare is primarily about security and DNS, and only then caching

Everything in free plan, except dns feature, is an illusion which bears null advantage for small sites.

hmm unless you know what you are doing:

1) I use Super Page Cache for Cloudflare "Cache Everything" plugin and got 100% score on GTMetrix and the website load extremely fast.

2) I replaced Wordpress cron with Cloudflare workers which do cron job every 1 min taking off the load on my backend server.

3) As I ran Nginx/Apache backend, I encountered numerous bots scraping and visiting daily that I had to totally filtered off all traffic with Nginx access rule and block bots with user agents, restrict common WP uri paths and blank user agents with Cloudflare WAF security rules. I had almost zero malicious and scraping bots now, prior to that my stopbot plugin and Wordfence logs were full of bots entries.

and I did this all for free.

hacktek

Likely impossible for free since you can't have intermediate caching without paying...you'd have to pay for Argo to get that.

Alternatively use their edge storage solution, but that'll also cost you money.

inland

@LTniger said: What do you need to cache? Images? Read this fascinating story: https://chevereto.com/community/threads/banned-from-cloudflare-image-hosting-against-tos.12383/ and read CF ToS.

You're scaring him away. CF ToS clearly mentions disproportionate percentage of images, movies, audio files or other non-HTML content. If you host a normal site and not an image/video hosting, there's nothing to be worried about. Hell, even if you just disregard the ToS, you'll find that Cloudflare is actually pretty generous with the traffic allowance.

Even in the thread you link, they were using hundreds of terabytes per month for years on free tier before CF caught up. With that amount of traffic, some providers can kick you off your "unlimited" VPS or dedi that you pay real money for.

bench

@inland said: You're scaring him away. CF ToS clearly mentions disproportionate percentage of images, movies, audio files or other non-HTML content. If you host a normal site and not an image/video hosting, there's nothing to be worried about. Hell, even if you just disregard the ToS, you'll find that Cloudflare is actually pretty generous with the traffic allowance.

I have been passing through them for many years 30TB+ in the form of archives or videos, so far no problems and warnings

eva2000

@EthanZou said:
Hello everyone!
How to achieve a high cache hit ratio with Cloudflare Free Plan?
Is it possible? and how did you do it all?
Thanks in advance!

Yes it's possible

1. Re-define what requests you are measuring. So exclude all requests which you know can't or shouldn't be cache hits i.e. POST requests, non-200 HTTP status code i.e. 403/404 and URLs which you don't expect to be cached i.e. /login /contact /admin and then evaluate your cache hit rate on requests that are left over after the exclusions My Wordpress blog's HTML page Cloudflare cache hit rate = 99.8%
2. then leverage Cloudflare Page Rules, Cache Rules and Transform Rules to create rules to cover static file requests which Cloudflare doesn't cache by default but you want cached and/or dynamic HTML pages which are for guests using Cache Rules with cookie bypass or Page Rules with bypass cache on cookie (CF Business or higher plans) or bypass cache on cookie via custom Cloudflare Worker caching

raindog308

@LTniger said: What do you need to cache? Images? Read this fascinating story: https://chevereto.com/community/threads/banned-from-cloudflare-image-hosting-against-tos.12383/ and read CF ToS.

The amount of "I demand free service" entitlement demanded in that thread is hilarious.

EthanZou

@JasonM said: use cf workers to cache

Many thanks, JasonM
And how to use cf workers with my site?

remove etag/timestamp headers from html

So for what purpose?

EthanZou

@desperand said:

@JasonM said:

I've started to write my long story.
But JasonM did it very compact and good.
I just can add few cents, For more information check:
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/about/default-cache-behavior/

Thanks a lot and how to use cf workers to cache with laravel?

EthanZou

@eDigital said:

@LTniger said:

@bench said:

@m4nu said: This always made me wonder why everyone puts their small website behind CF

For me, cloudflare is primarily about security and DNS, and only then caching

Everything in free plan, except dns feature, is an illusion which bears null advantage for small sites.

hmm unless you know what you are doing:

1) I use Super Page Cache for Cloudflare "Cache Everything" plugin and got 100% score on GTMetrix and the website load extremely fast.

2) I replaced Wordpress cron with Cloudflare workers which do cron job every 1 min taking off the load on my backend server.

3) As I ran Nginx/Apache backend, I encountered numerous bots scraping and visiting daily that I had to totally filtered off all traffic with Nginx access rule and block bots with user agents, restrict common WP uri paths and blank user agents with Cloudflare WAF security rules. I had almost zero malicious and scraping bots now, prior to that my stopbot plugin and Wordfence logs were full of bots entries.

and I did this all for free.

Sounds great and you use cf workers to do cron job? for what?

EthanZou

@hacktek said:
Likely impossible for free since you can't have intermediate caching without paying...you'd have to pay for Argo to get that.

Alternatively use their edge storage solution, but that'll also cost you money.

Hmm, if so Bunny would be my last choice.

EthanZou

@inland said:

@LTniger said: What do you need to cache? Images? Read this fascinating story: https://chevereto.com/community/threads/banned-from-cloudflare-image-hosting-against-tos.12383/ and read CF ToS.

You're scaring him away. CF ToS clearly mentions disproportionate percentage of images, movies, audio files or other non-HTML content. If you host a normal site and not an image/video hosting, there's nothing to be worried about. Hell, even if you just disregard the ToS, you'll find that Cloudflare is actually pretty generous with the traffic allowance.

Even in the thread you link, they were using hundreds of terabytes per month for years on free tier before CF caught up. With that amount of traffic, some providers can kick you off your "unlimited" VPS or dedi that you pay real money for.

CF, YES!

EthanZou

@bench said:

@inland said: You're scaring him away. CF ToS clearly mentions disproportionate percentage of images, movies, audio files or other non-HTML content. If you host a normal site and not an image/video hosting, there's nothing to be worried about. Hell, even if you just disregard the ToS, you'll find that Cloudflare is actually pretty generous with the traffic allowance.

I have been passing through them for many years 30TB+ in the form of archives or videos, so far no problems and warnings

30TB+ a month?

EthanZou

@eva2000 said:

@EthanZou said:
Hello everyone!
How to achieve a high cache hit ratio with Cloudflare Free Plan?
Is it possible? and how did you do it all?
Thanks in advance!

Yes it's possible

1. Re-define what requests you are measuring. So exclude all requests which you know can't or shouldn't be cache hits i.e. POST requests, non-200 HTTP status code i.e. 403/404 and URLs which you don't expect to be cached i.e. /login /contact /admin and then evaluate your cache hit rate on requests that are left over after the exclusions My Wordpress blog's HTML page Cloudflare cache hit rate = 99.8%
2. then leverage Cloudflare Page Rules, Cache Rules and Transform Rules to create rules to cover static file requests which Cloudflare doesn't cache by default but you want cached and/or dynamic HTML pages which are for guests using Cache Rules with cookie bypass or Page Rules with bypass cache on cookie (CF Business or higher plans) or bypass cache on cookie via custom Cloudflare Worker caching

Nice! Thanks a lot and how to use Cloudflare Worker with my site?

EthanZou

Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600
Cache-Control: private, max-age=3600

What's the difference between public and private?

FatGrizzly

@EthanZou said:
Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600
Cache-Control: private, max-age=3600

What's the difference between public and private?

I found this paragraph a few days ago, should be quite informative.

The “public” response directive indicates that any cache MAY store the response whereas the “private” response directive indicates that the response message is intended for a single user and MUST NOT be stored by a shared cache.