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  • Improving Flarum speed with Cloudflare cache

MohdKhan I'm completely disagree

Why you disagree, I mean you haven't written the reason!

[deleted] Before I placed my site behind of Cloudflare, my TTFB was almost 600ms - crazy for a server located in Europe. After placing it behind Cloudflare, the TTFB dropped to 30ms.

Yes its the truth

MohdKhan if I talked about WP ... check https://blog.yawe.in...

Maybe you are using server level caching or having a ultra great server, The cloudflare option is for users like me who are hosting from home having low-end server or running their sites on shared hosting!

Walys not only for speed but also for safety like ddos attacks

This made me remind of blocking IP that i does, like I do always take a 404 page for example domain/testtest and then set the rule challenge captcha or anything in firewall then run anything like you may want to block Migrate of Flarum LAB take that url and enter in MigrateofFlarum Lab input field run scan it will show forbidden or anything you set up then you can go to firewall overview and get MigrateofFlarum Lab IP and block that with a rule so that you can simply save bandwidth and No One can scan your forum.

MohdKhan I'm not using cloudflare and have approx 25+ extensions on my flarum still flarum load faster than discuss also...

Its ultra Great if you have no issue can i get a link.

            I have very mixed feelings about Cloudflare. It can be great and it can also be much less so depending on the application.

            One of the problems is that it lulls people into believing that they don't need to look at or worry about why their site is slow in the first place, because sticking it behind CF and switching on everything you can will just make it all ok. It's covering up a problem rather than fixing it.

            Used as just a DNS provider though, with all of the little orange clouds turned off, it is absolutely great. Very fast and reliable anycast DNS for free, there is nothing else that competes with that.

            As an aside, real user speed experience is more important than all of the metric sites, and you can't really rely too heavily on what any one of the tells you, because they will all tell you something different, there are so many variables in their testing.

            As an example, I just tried the same page on the same site in PageSpeed Insights and then in Bytecheck.

            Pagespeed gives it a score of 93 on mobile and 100 on desktop - total loading time is 0.6s on desktop
            Bytecheck gives it a score of 2 out of 5 stars - with a time to first byte of 0.9s and total loading time of 1.1s

              JohnP YES 🤣 you are right the scores goes sometimes too up or too down so we can't actually believe on this scanners however Cloudflare still increases speed. I am looking for a way so that I can enable edge cache for guests only but unable to make a page rule as it works with url only and flarum doesn't adds anything in url when user is logged in or not!

                  JohnP Used as just a DNS provider though, with all of the little orange clouds turned off, it is absolutely great. Very fast and reliable anycast DNS for free, there is nothing else that competes with that.

                  Agreed.... that's what I'm saying
                  actually I was using it in earlier days but later I came to know that if you're using Cloudflare, just use their DNS or with default settings.

                  I am not against CF, I've tried it, tried ArvanCloud (alternative to CloudFlare)...
                  later I realise that cloudflare is just showing fake results or it's a myth.

                  to know actual power of your server or to know how much traffic your server can handle I recommend you https://app.k6.io

                  Thanks

                  1Dot ping me on discord MohdKhan#9938

                      1Dot however Cloudflare still increases speed.

                      In most cases yes, but not in all of them.

                        1 more reason Why can't I use CloudFlare is that here in India, two providers (in my knowledge) block CloudFlare IPs.
                        #Reason - Most Piracy Content Websites use CloudFlare to hide their server IPs.

                        and most of the users are from one of these two providers.

                          MohdKhan

                          Bro, there are many sites but it doesn't affect anything and Nowadays all the DMCA complaints were filled to google not hosting providers.

                          And maximum of them install Cloudflare to save their sites by DDOS and increase their speed.

                          And as far I know they never use blacklisted IPs for use sites.

                              xasharma I've personal experience... the two providers are
                              AirTel
                              RailTel

                              mostly they blocked IPv6 of Cloudflare.

                                  MohdKhan

                                  Bro maybe DNS issue .... Many ISP's don't provide 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (google DNS) like bsnl so we have to change on our own.

                                    tried this too

                                    Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1
                                    Quad9
                                    Google Public DNS
                                    OpenDNS
                                    and ofcourse Adguard DNS

                                      While using Cloudflare might be good for website speed (as any CDN basically), it comes with the risk of centralization (when Cloudflare has issues your website is also down) and a massive privacy issue as Cloudflare can now track all your users and even perform MitM attacks.

                                      In addition many users are shut out of Cloudflare fronted websites as they block some (mostly 3rd world) ISP IP ranges or put them behind multiple captchas to access your website. Same for people browsing with Tor.

                                      IMHO, it is better to fix your website and/or to look for a better server then relying on Cloudflare.

                                        MohdKhan AirTel

                                        Hey I am airtel user from 5 years no such issue faced ever in opening sites using CF.

                                        However just for your information websites are blocked by hostname not IPs.

                                          [deleted] Yes 😁 My Cloudflare Site also won in this test

                                          MohdKhan still flarum load faster than discuss also

                                          Its wrong! I tested it myself on gt metrix I have scores also, If someone wants then let me know

                                              • [deleted]

                                              • Post #38

                                              Walys I've recently placed my rabbit sanctuary website behind CF which is running WordPress, and I'm getting a TTFB of 30ms 🙂

                                                  [deleted]

                                                  30ms is insanely low, and pretty impressive. Anything below 250ms is good in my eyes, with sub-150ms being excellent.

                                                  My GitHub Pages + Cloudflare set-up for my personal site manages 70ms for TTFB, which is pretty good for free hosting if I do say so myself! 😂

                                                      Personally, I don’t use Cloudflare to hide issues. I use it because no matter how I set a website up it makes the site faster. WordPress. Flarum. Whatever CMS. It doesn’t matter. Their tools make the site faster. And faster in more locations.

                                                      I just hope Cloudflare sticks around forever and always keeps their free tier.

                                                      davwheat Brother if you use Edge Caching and set Cache Level to Cache Everything for your Static Pages you will always get A grade 90% guaranteed.

                                                      Also If anyone is looking for a Tutorial In order to get Cloudflare Boost and Security for Flarum CMS simply see it here

                                                        The truth is that most forums with high traffic all use a system like Cloudfare.
                                                        Something good has to have.

                                                        poVoq While using Cloudflare might be good for website speed (as any CDN basically)

                                                        And only sometimes, Cloudflare is not a good CDN, it's known to have bad routing, it sometimes slows down your website a lot. I've had this problem for months on my forum, Cloudflare routed traffic from Italy to the USA or to Australia for no reason.

                                                        Moreover, L7 DDoS protection is a bit of a joke, it doesn't handle L7 attacks unless you get tens of thousands of requests per second, it's pretty useless. You have to configure firewall rules by hand and most of the time enable them manually when you're under attack. Under attack mode is always bypassed nowadays.

                                                        Apart from this, however, I agree that using a CDN is helpful to protect from L4 attacks and to improve performance when the hosting provider doesn't have good connectivity. For example, if you use some small hosting it's likely that some random ISP doesn't have a good way to reach it (it depends on a lot of things), while if you use OVH/Hetzner/etc. you're likely to not have these problems. It also depends on where your server is located and where your users are located.

                                                        Also, you need to consider that a forum contains primarily dynamic content, and the fact that Flarum is a single page application makes CDN caching useful only on the first page load. It might improve the response time for the reasons above, but caching shouldn't play much of a role.

                                                        So be careful to use Cloudflare with lower plans, it might seem good because it's free but it's not always the best solution. My recommendation is to not use it just because everyone's doing it, think about it.