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Comment by thomseddon | Hacker News Reader

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...?

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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!

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