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Comment by calibas | Hacker News Reader

I was impressed by the performance, especially with ExpressJS, and started digging deeper until I noticed "cf-cache-status: HIT".

What I'm seeing is not really a "self-hosted website", but a Cloudflare-hosted cache of a self-hosted website.

Edit: I wanted to get an idea of the "real" performance, so I went to a non-existent page so the cache would miss. I waited 930ms for a 301, then another 590ms for the 404 page.

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Of course it's using cdn/Cloudflare. I live in the Caribbean. Good thing it was! A topic such as Home Lab will see traffic from all over globally. No cdn would be terrible idea.

Not sure of you are located but Pingdom test for 404 does not match your claim: https://tools.pingdom.com/#5ca8d73c1e400000

And of course 404 pages will be slower. Because Cloudflare still has to receive the request first, then check origin server roundtrip before responding.

The site is just a hobby page and the only thing public facing that I self hosted. Even my main blog which is hosted in North America uses full-page-cache CDN courtesy Bunnycdn.

I understand the need for Cloudflare in this case, I just didn't realize it was being used at first and got rather excited about the prospects of self-hosting. I don't mean to insult, I just got a false impression and wanted to make sure people here knew that the resources aren't really being served by your server, at least in most cases.

I just ran that Pingdom test again, 938ms for the 301 and 3861ms on the 404 on a missed cache. Now that it's in the cache, everything loads in less than 247ms.

No worries. I understand what you mean. I have not seen high response times (3 secs u report on first request) for 404s yet via Pingdom but then again the site has only 3 or 4 pages so not worried about 404 performance.

Thanks!

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