Improving Flarum speed with Cloudflare cache

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

MohdKhan

sed lyf

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

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.

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.

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

Well, I think I just beat that

davwheat 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!

Absolutely ! That's quite a milestone for shared hosting

For clarity, I'm not just using Cloudflare to mask a poor setup. I have an almost "OCD" like approach to correct setups !

1Dot It's not 100% true, Caching plays a ultra major role

This isn't true. Flarum is an SPA, meaning that "pages" are dynamically created meaning CF will have no real concept of these. What DOES make a difference is the delivery of the assets required to load the SPA initially. As these are being delivered from CF's edge network from a host near to your location, this improves the initial loading dramatically in most cases. Once the SPA is loaded, CF no longer plays a part unless you are calling another URL from a remote source that the browser does not have load in terms of assets.

1Dot It's not the truth basically, It may be a service outage that day.

That actually IS the truth. CF often re-route traffic as a means of clearing congestion on their own internal infrastructure and until it leaves their core or edge networks, you have no control whatsoever over that.

1Dot you can't say that its useless If you are in under attack you can simply configure firewall,

This depends on the nature of the attack. What @matteocontrini refers to is Layer 7 which is the topmost layer in the OSI model (Application level). Most DDoS attacks are are Levels 1, 2, and 3 (Physical, Data, Network). Application layer attacks would require the CF WAF, which isn't free.

To be completely transparent, you should NOT consider it safe to simply "hide" behind CF as I've alluded to in recent posts. The USP of CF is it's ability to cache at it's edge network but it doesn't operate in the same way as traditional CDN's in the sense that ALL traffic has to pass through CF before it reaches your own site. If that traffic gets re-routed, then it WILL slow your site down.

1Dot As It's something great if everyone is using google so you do one thing remove your google account today, this is absolutely wrong, If the service is good and free so it's obvious everyone will use it

This isn't even a close paradigm. Shared hosting is also "great" until it's oversold and then your website which was originally like a rocket now runs like a snail. CF won't fix that - there are so many providers that hide (recommend placing) sites behind CF to make their own performance inadequacies far less.

In short, CF is not the magic wand you may think it is. It certainly helps, and they have superior routing technology (just research ARGO), but there's an old saying in the UK which is 100% true

"There's no such thing as a free lunch"

This is a phrase used when a supplier or vendor takes you to lunch for "free". It looks like a nice gesture, but it's designed to get more business, therefore, you'll land up paying for that lunch elsewhere eventually. The same applies to CF. You get three page rules, which for the most part will give you enough to create static HTML page rules, disable security for /wp-admin in WordPress etc, then perhaps one more to disable the rocket loader on a particular URL because it screws up the JS.

After that, if you need any more, you have to pay. It's a business after all, and they aren't going to provide their entire suite for free - you'll get a "cut down" version of it meaning that enterprise customers will always take preference, and your site will become much slower because of their preference in terms of routing.