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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

Cost-comparisons aside, the massive speed improvement makes me think he didn't have caching configured correctly with Cloudflare and his PHP backend (thus defeating the entire point of the CDN aspect).

I'm guessing a couple of Cache-Control: headers would have provided similar latency improvements.

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Comparisons were done with CloudFlare on static site, it's been a very long time since the site was based on Laravel and PHP.

I had set Browser Cache Expiration to 1 month within my CloudFlare settings as was luckily screenshotted within a previous article: https://medium.com/@elliot_f/my-journey-into-web-speed-optim...

I'm fairly sure that I had some speed optimizations set within my Nginx server block. Unfortunately, I don't have the Nginx config file to hand anymore as I've (somewhat stupidly) deleted the snapshots without taking a backup.

I'm no Cloudflare nor Cloudfront expert but these should be apples-to-apples comparisons and seeing that huge disparity in latency makes me think it's most likely a configuration issue, as all comparisons I've ever seen claim they perform roughly about the same: https://blog.latency.at/2017-09-06-cdn-comparison/

Specifically though we're talking about how long Cloudflare caches your content on their proxy/edge servers. Browser caching is irrelevant for this discussion, as speed tests of this nature should always be performed on a clean request.

I can't claim I am either, unfortunately. I required assistance ensuring the certs were in place and my configuration was correct when doing the migration.

And just to clarify, based on some of the articles I've read, I actually think CloudFlare may be a better choice of CDN, this post just highlights one way of achieving a global-scale website and doing it in such a way that it's resilient and cheap as chips!

That setting is what Cloudflare passes on down to your visitors, not how long it caches itself.

I don't actually know cloudflare personally, but assuming they're following the spec, you need to set "Cache-Control: max-age=300" or "Cache-Control: s-maxage=300" to tell cloudflare to cache a given response for 5 minutes.

There is a substantial performance difference in SSL handshake speed and site performance if you have a central server, vs multi-edge storage before you get to Cloudflare. The closer your edges are to Cloudflare's edges when the handshake happens the faster things go. The handshake delay is particularly slow internationally with Heroku running under CF, since you can't predict what heroku IP you are fetching from, unless you fix to one point and then latencies are still long at far away locations.

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