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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

So how is that different from any other CDN?

CDNJS is actually orders of magnitude more likely to have a cache hit than this new offering.

It describes it in the first paragraph. It acts as a proxy to serve ESM JS files (for any top-level package that's already in ESM syntax) that modern browsers can use natively without a build/transpile step. Looks like they recently added automatic polyfills for older browsers too.

CDNJS is just a standard CDN that serves up files as they're packaged, but if you want a high hit-ratio then https://jsDelivr.com has the most marketshare currently, and more features.

"CDNJS" returns 5X more results in Google compared to "jsDelivr", so you're more likely to get a cache hit.

Are you sure it has the most marketshare?

A google search for the name has nothing to do with network coverage and volume of the CDN traffic.

CDNJS is only using Cloudflare, JsDelivr has a bigger network with more partners and support for both npm and github.

Google search tells you how popular it is, and that's what matters when getting a cache hit. Network coverage doesn't affect that.

You can also try Google Trends, which tells you CDNJS is around twice as popular:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=CDNJS,jsde...

I think you need to treat "commonly searched" and "commonly hit by users while browsing" very differently. It's not popularity of searching or articles written about a CDN that determines the cache hits.

Google search can only tell you how popular something is to search and how much content there is about it. They aren't going to be showing you a website just because there's a src="cdn.example.com" in the code, only if it's in the text.

To actually know then you either need them to report their # of users and trust them, or scrape tons of websites and check their source for which CDN they use.

You can also search Github.

CDNJS: 18M references

jsDelivr: 1M references

I showed you 3 different sources that prove CDNJS is much more popular. You showed zero so far.

You may be right that CDNJS is more likely to result in cache hits, it's just that none of these figures actually help in finding out the answer.

CDNJS being in 1000 small github blogs could easily be less impactful than a single large website using jsDelivr. We have no idea if the github projects are even used.

Again, it may well be the case that it's better in this way, but these figures show nothing really either way.

Here's a bit of an attempt at looking more at it, though I don't know their methodology:

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cd-jsdelivr/all/all

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cd-cdnjs/all/all

Ones that jump out there are dailymail and yelp, depending on your expected users you might expect one or the other does better for you.

These links also support my claim. Again, you posted zero evidence to the contrary.

We aren't arguing for the contrary. We're just trying to make sure you're evaluating them correctly.

IanCal found some nice links that support your claim, but he even added that depending on what and how you use it, either may be better for you (You wanted to count cache hits).

This isn't some game to win, I wanted to show that there may be more useful metrics that correspond to what we care about here, and talk of the nuances that might be important. I don't really care who said the right thing first but I do care what the reality is.

The thread is about cache hit ratio which is not that simple. A file is either cached at an endpoint or not, regardless of whether it's downloaded once or a billion times. CDNJS only supports ~3k libraries and gets most of its usage from jQuery and FontAwesome.

jsDelivr has an automated backend proxy to support any NPM package, Github repo, or Wordpress.org plugin. It also uses Cloudflare as one of its backends, so at worst it's at parity with CDNJS in cache hits or far better due to more network partners, more global regions, and more packages from more origins.

Anything on CDNJS is also likely cached by jsDelivr, but most of everything cached on jsDelivr is not even available on CDNJS.

The other side though is if something is cached at the client, right? I thought that was what people were talking about with cache hits.

> So how is that different from any other CDN?

I struggled to see the value-add, I think it does automatic bundling & inserts polyfills based on UA strings. The whole pika project looks like a rewrite/alternative to the npm servers, kind of like MetaCPAN is for perl's CPAN+search.cpan.org

I struggled because the landing page & about were very light on the project/product's overview, too details-focused for me and I suppose anyone else who wasn't already aware of it.

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