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Hi John, I remember listening to your talk at dotGo 2014 :-) I tried CloudFlare in November 2012 (3 years ago, and not 1 year ago as I wrote in my previous comment). At that time, the origin server was hosted by Typhon in France. I remember that after having enabled CloudFlare, the latency was significantly increased. I haven't kept the specific timings, but to give you an idea, the response time was like 100 ms without CloudFlare and 500 ms through CloudFlare. That said, it was a long time ago and I can guess things have changed a lot since. So I did a new test today. The origin server is hosted by DigitalOcean in Amsterdam. The median response time from my machine is around 100 ms. After enabling CloudFlare, I cannot see a significant difference in response time. The median response time, and the distribution of response time, looks very similar. I guess that during the last few years you have expanded your network and your connections with the major hosting providers (Amazon, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, etc.). Maybe it explains the difference between today's test and 3 years ago? In general, is it useful and/or recommended to use CloudFlare in front a fully dynamic service, for example a HTTP-JSON API, with no static content (no images, no stylesheets, no scripts), and thus no need for the CDN feature? |
In general, is it useful and/or recommended to use CloudFlare in front a fully dynamic service, for example a HTTP-JSON API, with no static content (no images, no stylesheets, no scripts), and thus no need for the CDN feature?
We do have lots of customers who do that. Two reasons: Railgun and Security. Railgun gives speedups for the JSON because of the ability to diff the boilerplate JSON. Security for APIs is of course important and clearly attackers like to go after APIs.