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First time byte performance
- Thread starter Richieboy67
- Start date
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
You will never, ever have good first byte time performance using cloudflare.
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
CF doesn't do anything for you but interfere with the handshake (this is what produces the poor FBT) and serve your static content ostensibly closer to the user than your host is. You don't need it if your site is optimized, and it doesn't do any optimization for you anyway.
It's useless. Plus it goes down, a lot. It's not as reliable for uptime as your host is. I used it for two years myself until I learned how to truly optimize a site.
Dump it permanently, is my advice.
And you're not stuck relying on "feel" anymore, you have scientific, objective, real-world testing with WebPageTest to rely on.
I can't argue that it hurts speeds. The tests show that.
But it means that to get rid of it, I would need to invest in servers with more bandwidth allowance. CF is mostly used by me to cache and serve static files to reduce my bandwidth consumption. And it has been doing quite well for that, by saving me over 50%.
But I suppose that's fine. I don't want to end up with double whammies on the handshakes once I start using SSL. It's my understanding that this also causes a hit to TTFB.
But it means that to get rid of it, I would need to invest in servers with more bandwidth allowance. CF is mostly used by me to cache and serve static files to reduce my bandwidth consumption. And it has been doing quite well for that, by saving me over 50%.
But I suppose that's fine. I don't want to end up with double whammies on the handshakes once I start using SSL. It's my understanding that this also causes a hit to TTFB.
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
Bandwidth allocations/limits/allowances don't exist anymore, that I know of. Even some of the cheaper shared hosting is unlimited bandwidth/unlimited storage. I pay around $160 a year for a shared machine that is all unlimited, including unlimited sites hosted.
Surely you're not getting SO much traffic that the naked server gets clogged. Unless you have really high traffic, the bandwidth savings is negligible.
Hell, you can save more bandwidth by just serving more svelte pages and leveraging browser cache of static content. What's your total page kb load, for the visitor?
That all depends on the reliability, uptime and speed of the 3rd party SSL certificate provider you choose. Same with CF and most anything else 3rd party, you can't control it.
By the way, without testing your site myself and doing a analysis, I'm really just mostly spitballing. All I know is what's worked for the dozens of other people we've helped. But I could go into more detail if I had a link to your site, so I can analyze.
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Sorry, I've been out for a while.
First, I'm not at a point that I need you to take time out of your day to analyze my stuff. It's awesome of you to be willing, but I don't feel right about it when I'm not having any true issues and was only seeking opinions. As far as my forum goes, it is not slow by any means. My home page (according to vboptimize) loads in about .17 seconds. If I turn off the shoutbox, that drops by ~.1 second. This isn't the results the page test show, obviously, but it's the general perceived load speed, and my users tell me the speed is fine anyway.
And second, the main reason I didn't post a link to it, or show the url in the page test result is the fact that the forum is not family friendly. It's not a full-out A/O rated forum, but it does have some NSFW elements/areas.
I'll probably keep this one until I get to a point where an upgrade is necessary.
I've also been considering switching to nginx all around, instead of just using it on my static file server, just for that extra boost it gives over apache.
First, I'm not at a point that I need you to take time out of your day to analyze my stuff. It's awesome of you to be willing, but I don't feel right about it when I'm not having any true issues and was only seeking opinions. As far as my forum goes, it is not slow by any means. My home page (according to vboptimize) loads in about .17 seconds. If I turn off the shoutbox, that drops by ~.1 second. This isn't the results the page test show, obviously, but it's the general perceived load speed, and my users tell me the speed is fine anyway.
And second, the main reason I didn't post a link to it, or show the url in the page test result is the fact that the forum is not family friendly. It's not a full-out A/O rated forum, but it does have some NSFW elements/areas.
Forum home page is about 500kb, and I chose a random wiki page with some images in it - ~1800kb.
My forum server is about $20/m. I could probably do better if I looked around, but so far this one has had great service, and it's plenty fast. It has SSD/6 cores. It has enough RAM, for now, at 2GB. It is lacking in bandwidth allowance, though, at only 750GB/m.
I'll probably keep this one until I get to a point where an upgrade is necessary.
I've also been considering switching to nginx all around, instead of just using it on my static file server, just for that extra boost it gives over apache.
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
That's actually, a lot less time than I have already been spending. :biggrin1:
Anyhow, I have seen people with a lot worse problems than you have, and with a lot more work to do than you have. You seem to have it well in hand.
Glad we could help, if we did.