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Cloudflare will actually slow down TTFB for small, less popular sites since they don't maintain a keepalive connection to the origin. This means you pay an additional TCP/TLS setup cost from the Cloudflare POP to the origin which is worse than a direct connection. I also tried testing a smart-placed worker and cloudflared, neither of which seemed to help.

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They can use keepalive but it's likely the small sites are not getting enough traffic on the edge nodes to maintain the connections.

You don't think taking a small hit on TTFB is a good trade off for the improved scaling that a CDN offers?

Gone are the days that you don't have to worry about bot traffic being a DDOS. An unresponsive site is a lot worse than an extra TCP/TLS setup.

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