Is Cloudflare and Redis really necessary today?

[Sonnie]

We are on version 2.3.5, and we've been using Cloudflare and Redis for several years. However, I am curious if these are really needed any longer.

Our loads are typically on the lower side, although that could be due to having cached systems in place.

It appears Cloudflare also handles threats, but I'm not sure how accurate this really is and if these are real threats. Here's the last month from the stats:

 

[Seeker-Smith]

Good question.

 

[Sim]

You don't actually need Redis - your site will generally work perfectly well without it. However, the point of Redis is to speed up responsiveness of the site by caching certain content and thus avoid database lookups and/or disk IO.

Cloudflare also provides some caching options with the ability to cache static content and serve it to end users from edge locations closer to their location - thus reducing latency and increasing perceived performance. Again, it is not necessary, but it does help the site feel faster to end users.

I do think that Cloudflare threat mitigation is the most important thing here though - both reducing the chance of DDOS attacks impacting on your site, but more importantly - giving you more control over bot traffic, especially malicious and badly behaved bots, but also AI bots scraping your site without your content. It also makes it easy to identify specific issues or attack vectors and block them via the firewall facility.

It's not strictly necessary - your site can function quite well without it - but I think your overall site performance, security and reliability will improve by using it.

I'd say that Cloudflare today is more useful than ever before - bot traffic is increasing significantly, especially with the growth in AI bots - and that is creating a lot of unnecessary extra load on servers.

In summary: neither are strictly necessary, but both serve a useful purpose and personally, I do use both of them with all of my XenForo sites.

 

[D.O.A.]

Redis is essential as is fastcgi caching for guests. I run a tiny 8gb VPS with two 3.5ghz cores, nvme drives, with ES and dozens of add-ons for 400,000 users. I'm not spending like a drunken sailor on resources - a more powerful server - when it's not needed at all. Xenforo will run well on a potato if you can configure a potato well without hungry crap like cPanel involved and cache to lighten the load. At the end of the day that's what caching is for. To reduce the load.

 

[Suzanne O]

I'm a cloudflare user. I think it's a great thing to use. It's much better than the question/answer thing we used to use.

 

[smallwheels]

I'm a cloudflare user. I think it's a great thing to use. It's much better than the question/answer thing we used to use.

You missed the whole point of potential cloudflare advantages in the op's scenario, reducing it to a single feature (that in practice ist totally annoying on many websites) that does not target the question of the op.

 

[Can]

Redis is a server-side caching system, while Cloudflare acts as a reverse-proxy CDN that caches content at the edge. One handles application-level caching, and the other handles edge caching close to the end user. Could using both at the same time cause any conflicts? I’d like to know based on your experience.

 

[Sim]

Redis is a server-side caching system, while Cloudflare acts as a reverse-proxy CDN that caches content at the edge. One handles application-level caching, and the other handles edge caching close to the end user. Could using both at the same time cause any conflicts? I’d like to know based on your experience.

There are two separate uses for Redis in XenForo: application settings cache - which is basically caching the contents of the XF data registry (the xf_data_registry table for your forum) and speeds up application performance by keeping frequently accessed data in memory and avoiding additional database hits. This is completely unrelated to anything you'd use Cloudflare for and there is no concern about conflicts at that level.

The other thing you could use Redis for is Guest Page Caching in XenForo - and this is where some over-lap with Cloudflare functionality could come in.

At a basic level, Cloudflare can be used to cache static content or content fragments such as images and CSS files. That's pretty standard usage and generally won't cause any issues.

However, if you want to use full page caching for guests - my understanding is that you can either do that at the Cloudflare level (via the Cloudflare addon by @digitalpoint ), or at the XenForo level (potentially using Redis - but other cache engines are available).

I wouldn't think you'd want to do both - but I'm not an expert in Guest Page Caching.

In summary - even if using Cloudflare, you might still want to implement Redis as a caching option for XenForo - just not for guest page caching, which is probably better handled at the Cloudflare level.

 

[Suzanne O]

I use Cloudflare due to the amount of spam registrations i used to get when i used Question Answer.
I suggest that you take getting rid of spammers/scammers and hackers seriously.

 

[nocte]

I use Cloudflare due to the amount of spam registrations i used to get when i used Question Answer.

I think you mix the main Cloudflare service (as proxy) and the Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA (which is a small part of their services).

 

[philmckrackon]

I use Cloudflare due to the amount of spam registrations i used to get when i used Question Answer.
I suggest that you take getting rid of spammers/scammers and hackers seriously.

Carefully craft your XF sign up and your systems eliminate spam accounts.

 

[Suzanne O]

I think you mix the main Cloudflare service (as proxy) and the Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA (which is a small part of their services).

I use cloudflare turnstile as the captcha
It was recommended to me by Xenforo staff because of the amount of spammers and scammers were coming onto my forum