CloudFlare's new web protocol speeds up dynamic web performance | Hacker News Reader

CloudFlare's new web protocol speeds up dynamic web performance

blog.cloudflare.com

34 pointsjgrahamc12 comments

I must say, we recently upgraded to "Business" for the 100% uptime and the layer 7 DDOS protection and were impressed with the prospect of using Railgun.

After a couple of days of trial and error (kept failing due to too many open file handles) we now have it running smoothly but have noticed little to no speed improvement both vs what it was before and vs other sites on the same environment.

Would be interesting to know if anyone else has had a similar/dissimilar experience...?

I'd be interested in talking to you about your site and understand what's happening. Feel free to ping me via the email in my profile.

i actually saw decreased performance. it seems if your server is already fast (ivy bridge w/ ssd, 10gbps network), it slows it down and their service becomes the bottleneck.

Unless your servers are really slow their service will always be the bottleneck. I'll keep repeating this every time the Cloudflare spam comes up on HN (which happens with disturbing frequency): Do your homework, measure them. Cloudflare slows your site down instead of speeding it up. There is no free lunch.

We don't have slow servers. We've measured before and afters on multiple clients and have seen quick page render times on the client end after rolling CloudFlare in. Caching static assets on a CDN (like CloudFlare) speeds up overall page load time. The minification features around HTML, CSS, JS, also improve transfer times. If you have optimized html, don't expect html serving to be faster (as you have more hops - unless you use railgun maybe).

Homework done, measurements taken. Happy with the results.

Pretty much the same here... and we have the fabled e-commerce style pages (because we do e-commerce).

The only thing that we saw a slowdown for was when we connect to pages from our office, when our servers are in town.. but that's not the fault of Cloudflare, but simply that they don't have servers in the same city as us!

The headline made me pay attention to how long the article page took to load, and it actually seemed quite slow to me.

A quick dig reveals that to be the fault of Posterous, not CloudFlare:

    $ dig blog.cloudflare.com
    ...
    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    blog.cloudflare.com.	21	IN	CNAME	blog.cloudflare.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.
    blog.cloudflare.com.cdn.cloudflare.net.	21 IN CNAME cloudflare.posterous.com.
    cloudflare.posterous.com. 1243	IN	A	184.106.20.99

So it looks like requests are going directly to Posterous. Seems like an obvious place for CloudFlare to showcase their speed.

"Railgun" is just a fancy name for Cloudflare's implementation of DSA (Internap and Akamai sometimes call it "Whole Site Delivery").

Every other major CDN offers some variation on this same service. Suck the bits in at a server close to the origin, compress them using proprietary voodoo, expand things at the server closest to the client.

Akamai owns the relevant patents on this (which it acquired from the Netli acquisition) and has used them to sue then acquire other companies like Cotendo. See http://www.google.com/patents/US6820133 and http://www.google.com/patents/US7293093

I'm sure Cloudflare will comment, but it seems a little different to that. Rather than suck the original bits in at a server close to the origin, it looks like it takes the compressed (delta) bits direct from the origin itself.

Correct. It's ISN'T DSA. It's very promising for eCommerce sites which may have a personalized header (Name, Cart Contents, etc...) and some customized Ads/CTAs/Marketing slots, but where the bulk of the page (often a very large page - 100+ KB) will be the same for everyone.

The obvious win is pushing less bytes across the wire. The less obvious win is that it allows the application server response to complete VERY fast, freeing up the app server thread to handle more requests. This is the larger win for large scale 3-tier applications.

Sure, but that's just splitting hairs. Rather than colocate DSA appliances with the origin (which again is not new), they simply run the software on the origin machine.

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