Over-optimisation slows your site
- Thread starter Jon12345
- Start date
Cloudflare will slow down your Time to first byte.
It will not be the same with just direct server access.
Jon12345
Well-known member
The DNS lookup speeds on Cloudflare are a significant improvement over my domain registrars. I've gone from like 110ms to 10ms. I know that affects TTFB. But I am not sure what else affects it. I would have thought distance to a POP, and Cloudflare has the most. An interesting thread would be the best settings for the paid version of Cloudlfare for people who have Xenforo forums. I would be interested in reading that info!
You can still use Cloudflare but for DNS only with orange cloud disable/grayed.
Then switch back to Free plan.
Or you can try Argo/Railgun/Full Page Caching via Cookie which is expensive.
Yes.
Systm
Active member
The free and premium plans offer identical DNS lookups, cache size, speeds, and edge locations (except China on the enterprise plan).
This is what I was trying to say on the other thread.Why am I paying $20pm then?
Yes but downside slow TTFB.
Jon12345
Well-known member
I am befuddled! lol
I see the image compression as a bonus when someone has a sizeable image in a thread. But those threads are in the minority. Most threads only have the avatars as images and they are relatively small in size.
I see the options on the orange cloud as being proxied or DNS only. What is being proxied on that setting?
Are we saying that just having DNS only will not slow the TTFB, only the proxied setting will do that? I presume it is the security aspects of Cloudflare that slow the TTFB.
You guys are making me think that I just blew $20 on the wrong thing! What would you spend that $20 on to improve the site speed?
I see the image compression as a bonus when someone has a sizeable image in a thread. But those threads are in the minority. Most threads only have the avatars as images and they are relatively small in size.
I see the options on the orange cloud as being proxied or DNS only. What is being proxied on that setting?
Are we saying that just having DNS only will not slow the TTFB, only the proxied setting will do that? I presume it is the security aspects of Cloudflare that slow the TTFB.
You guys are making me think that I just blew $20 on the wrong thing! What would you spend that $20 on to improve the site speed?
Systm
Active member
There are a couple of Xenforo addons which handle image compression, or you can do it yourself using nginx's image filter module. However, unless your site is very image heavy (which it doesn't sound like it is) the gains will be negligible. However, it's worth making sure that all of your theme images are compressed, but you can easily do this manually.
With the orange cloud, everything is being proxied, including all HTML, images, etc. This will have a small impact on TTFB for uncached items, like the initial page requests. However, images/css/js/etc should load faster as they're being sent from Cloudflare's edge locations, you can confirm this by looking at the headers of the static content requests and making sure there is "cf-cache-status: HIT". If you have good internet and are nearby to your origin server, the gains may be hard to see, but users who are further away or on poorer connections will see greater improvements.
By just using Cloudflare's DNS and not proxying your site through their network, you'll be missing out on your static content being cached throughout their CDN, as well as most of their other features.
Bear in mind every time you toggle the "cloud" DNS has to propagate again, which can take a while, although you can speed this up by clearing your local DNS cache, and using a third party DNS provider locally, and purging their DNS cache as well.
You could perhaps get a faster server, on a better network, but if your current server is adequate, then just save that $20.
I think you already have Litespeed, correct? Just tune that.
The only reason to use Cloudflare and the $20 option in particular is for the WAF feature if you are experiencing DDoS attacks. However, I've found that even that isn't very effective for certain types of attacks.
Jon12345
Well-known member
I'm still figuring that out myself, TBH. One of the sites where I provide tech support was recently migrated to a Knownhost VPS and we added Litespeed on the recommendation of @JonathanW. Among other things, Cloudflare wasn't managing multiple hits from China any more and then I ran into an annoying issue where I couldn't log in to the Cloudflare dashboard to make changes; we canceled Cloudflare.
If you sign in to the Litespeed Dashboard you will see that there are popups next to every setting to explain what is does and the recommended settings. It seems that by default many options are left at "Not set" and if you're unsure it's probably best to leave it that way. Our biggest concern was not site speed per se but having 2000+ "guests" from China and Taiwan online at the same time.
But ask your host about how you can improve performance with Litespeed. We don't have LSCache installed (yet anyway) but I understand that can also be optimized.
www.litespeedtech.com
You can get some more hints at
blog.litespeedtech.com
www.litespeedtech.com
If you sign in to the Litespeed Dashboard you will see that there are popups next to every setting to explain what is does and the recommended settings. It seems that by default many options are left at "Not set" and if you're unsure it's probably best to leave it that way. Our biggest concern was not site speed per se but having 2000+ "guests" from China and Taiwan online at the same time.
But ask your host about how you can improve performance with Litespeed. We don't have LSCache installed (yet anyway) but I understand that can also be optimized.
LiteSpeed Cache for XenForo - LiteSpeed Technologies
LiteSpeed Cache for XenForo is a PHP-based add-on that communicates with your installation of LiteSpeed Web Server and its built-in page cache to speed up your forums.
www.litespeedtech.com
You can get some more hints at
LiteSpeed Keeps Your Site Secure ⋆ LiteSpeed Blog
Learn how LiteSpeed keeps your site secure. Protect your servers with already familiar mod_security rules while also taking advantage of a host of built-in anti-DDoS features, such as bandwidth and connection throttling.
blog.litespeedtech.com
Anti-DDoS Solutions - LiteSpeed Technologies
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can bring a vulnerable server to its knees, but LiteSpeed's built-in anti-DDoS measures mitigate attacks before they become serious problems. In addition, LiteSpeed improves upon familiar security measures and makes them more flexible, more efficient...
www.litespeedtech.com
