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Comment by thenomad | Hacker News Reader

I actually benchmarked this a while ago. I use a lot of static pages that need to be absurdly fast.

I can definitively say that unless Google App Engine has substantially changed in architecture over the last 12 months, it is definitely not faster to host your static site there rather than on an nginx-based VPS with someone like Digital Ocean.

My tests showed load times on GAE-hosted static sites to be around 200ms - 300ms slower than a reasonably-optimised DO VPS.

It's possible, of course, that GAE would pick up some speed if you're loading the page from somewhere a long way away from the equivalent VPS, as GAE essentially comes with a built-in CDN (to the best of my understanding).

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Thanks for actually doing the research on this. My "um, wow" was a response to people assuming Company XYZ's performance is amazing at face value.

When serving static pages, it is unlikely that any sort of engine will outperform something more like a CDN. I hate it when people just throw out the Google name as proof of performance/excellence/etc. Can we be a bit more scientific here?

Elie Bursztein leads Google's anti-abuse research, and recently mentioned on Google+ that he moved his personal web site to GAE: http://www.elie.net/

I can load his GAE-hosted web site in ~300ms, and there's a useful performance box on the right sidebar of his site that breaks down how long each component takes to load on GAE:

$ time curl http://www.elie.net/ > /dev/null % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 36146 0 36146 0 0 113k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 114k real 0m0.316s user 0m0.005s sys 0m0.005s

I've been thinking of doing the same with my personal web site but haven't yet.

Interesting - that's 100ms faster than the test sites I was using.

Do you know what language he used to implement the base setup? I had a suspicion that implementing in Go might end up being faster than Python.

From some of his other posts I'm 99% sure that he used Python.

The great thing about static sites is that it's really easy to put them behind a CDN. Amazon Cloudfront is pay-what-you-use and seems pretty reasonable especially for smallish sites.

We currently use a mix of Akamai (100TB/month commit, static assets), Cloudfront (serves a static JS site out of S3, 10-50GB/month of usage), and Cloudflare (caches JSON get requests from an Elastic Beanstalk REST API). I've found Cloudfront to be faster than Akamai (although a bit pricier unless you're committing to 10TB+/month from a specific region), and Cloudflare to be faster than both (although with Cloudflare I can't invalidate individual files/URI paths, just the whole site, which I can live with).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Akamai have a not-insignificant minimum monthly charge?

And does Cloudflare cache HTML pages? Last I checked it only cached (what it considered) static assets and hit the origin for every page.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Akamai have a not-insignificant minimum monthly charge?

Yes. "It was like that when I got here." I'm working on it.

> And does Cloudflare cache HTML pages? Last I checked it only cached (what it considered) static assets and hit the origin for every page.

Yes. This is configurable.

Need to create page rules if you want to cache HTML pages.

Also, cloudflare does support clearing of individual files. There is an API for it. Pretty sure their web client does too.

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