[heipei]

Same here. We run a very content/media-heavy SaaS SPA application completely out of a single location in Germany and have customers that are primarily located in the US, and also in places like Australia and Japan. We don't use any CDN, every request has to go to our origin in Germany. Yet customers regularly tell us how fast and snappy our application is. Why? While we do make dozens or even hundreds of requests per page navigation in the SPA (images, XHR), these are all fired off in parallel, and none of these are blocking anything. A CDN would probably improve things slightly, but currently we don't feel like we need it.

[marginalia_nu]

CDNs can actually add quite a bit of latency depending on where you're located.

My server is located in Sweden, and for users in US West, access through Cloudflare adds like 100-150ms ping. It's very noticeable, bordering on intolerable for API access.

[quickthrower2]

Is that CDN or DDOS protection? CDN should serve static assets near the user. Has to be quicker unless something went very wrong.

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah, you can't have a public search endpoint or it will get spammed into oblivion. API endpoint is not cloudflared anymore though, since I use an API key system. But anything that is anonymous is basically toast if you don't use serious bot mitigation.

Cloudflare rejects about 2.5M search queries per day from bots. About ~20k make it through, and some of those are humans.

[komon]

I wonder what your actual cache hit rate is? Sounds like it could use some tuning since 100-150ms sounds consistent with most requests hitting the origin?