Cloudflare with IPB, CDN

[AlexWebsites]

I did not find may topics about Cloudflare, so I wanted to see who is using it with their IPB install. All I see is some DNS changes that need to be made, but I'm wondering if it will actually bring in site performance. The security seems a good thing. I mostly want to serve my images a bit faster over maybe a cdn and speed up browsing but since the site is not that big, I don't want to pay allot for a cdn.

I have about 23k pages views a month with 3k or so unique visitors, as far as my site traffic.

Any suggestions?

[handsoffsam]

The only way to know if it is going to do what you want is to establish goals and then to test. I would suggest setting up development version of your site and using that to test with.

It's worth noting that while CDNs are often a good thing, many times the static assets are cached locally at the browser after the initial request, making the CDN fairly worthless. Take my site, for example:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130929_PD_9X4/

Everything but the first request is cached after the first load of the site. The CDN isn't doing anything because no requests are even being made to it. (That's not true in this case, but that's because of the way Firefox's reload works; normal browsing would not see all of those 304s.)

robert

[7Bya9K&Q]

I actually had the same question a while back and nobody was able to give me a solid answer. I never set it up because I've always worried about the caching. Considering forums, and mine in particular, are constantly updating content I worry that it might cause more harm than good.

[wimg]

CDN, as far as I understand it, serves to cache static files, so if you have a lot of static files, like images, videos, etc. it will speed up your site, especially if you have a CDN supplier who will be able to serve these files fairly locally to the person browsing the site.

IOW, assume your host is situated in Texas, and a lot of members visit from, e.g., Asia. It would be beneficial to have a CDN which will cache in Asia as well. Essentially, it decreases the number of hops required to get the most data-intensive files downloaded and displayed, thus will provide a faster response. Also the processing of those files gets at least partly done by the CDN host.

This doesn't make a difference for the actual dynamic text content, as that is still generated by your server running the database and http-server, which it really has to do anyway.

Unless you have a site with lots of these static files, I wouldn't expect to see a real benefit. If things appear to be a bit slow right now, and you don't serve a lot of static files, you might want to consider a hosting package which provides more processing power.

HTH, warm regards, Wim

[AlexWebsites]

Thank you everyone for the responses. I'll have to test it and see if it makes it snappier. I really wanted to know if anyone has used Cloudflare, so I'm going to test it with one of my sites and see how it goes. You just change the dns settings supposedly and that is it.

[7Bya9K&Q]

CDN, as far as I understand it, serves to cache static files, so if you have a lot of static files, like images, videos, etc. it will speed up your site, especially if you have a CDN supplier who will be able to serve these files fairly locally to the person browsing the site.

IOW, assume your host is situated in Texas, and a lot of members visit from, e.g., Asia. It would be beneficial to have a CDN which will cache in Asia as well. Essentially, it decreases the number of hops required to get the most data-intensive files downloaded and displayed, thus will provide a faster response. Also the processing of those files gets at least partly done by the CDN host.

This doesn't make a difference for the actual dynamic text content, as that is still generated by your server running the database and http-server, which it really has to do anyway.

Unless you have a site with lots of these static files, I wouldn't expect to see a real benefit. If things appear to be a bit slow right now, and you don't serve a lot of static files, you might want to consider a hosting package which provides more processing power.

HTH, warm regards, Wim

So technically, you could use the CDN and it may or may not help you. But if it doesn't help you, it doesn't actually hurt anything else?

So there really is no harm in trying it out then?

[handsoffsam]

Other than making things a little bit more complex, correct, you generally are not going to hurt anything by using a CDN. I really recommend that you understand caching as it relates to HTTP protocol before introducing a CDN to the picture. As I tried to mention above, there are several layers of caches that exist. The best and fastest cache is the browser cache, and in general, IPB does a great job of utilizing it. This makes a CDN less likely to be useful.

robert

[AlexWebsites]

I set up one of my sites using the cloudflare free plan basic cdn and it seems ok and a little snappier actually. I noticed that the sidebar seems to load instantaneosly where it lagged a bit before. I'm on a dedictated server with other sites of mine. It has 8 GB of ram and utilizing eaccelerator and gzip.

[7Bya9K&Q]

Other than making things a little bit more complex, correct, you generally are not going to hurt anything by using a CDN. I really recommend that you understand caching as it relates to HTTP protocol before introducing a CDN to the picture. As I tried to mention above, there are several layers of caches that exist. The best and fastest cache is the browser cache, and in general, IPB does a great job of utilizing it. This makes a CDN less likely to be useful.

robert

I'm going to research cache information a little better. I assume IPS has some good caching systems but I don't consider myself an expert so I should look into this before I do anything.

I set up one of my sites using the cloudflare free plan basic cdn and it seems ok and a little snappier actually. I noticed that the sidebar seems to load instantaneosly where it lagged a bit before. I'm on a dedictated server with other sites of mine. It has 8 GB of ram and utilizing eaccelerator and gzip.

Thanks for replying back. Even the smallest speed increase can be useful for some users. I too notice the sidebar often lags, so this could be beneficial. However, my server is a shared host so I don't think my specs are anything to brag about. I wonder if cloudflare works even better and reseller since its usually slower to begin with?

[Websec GmbH]

My personal statement: i used cloudflare before. I removed it and wont ever use it again. Why? It makes the site actually slower. It doesnt add security. Their anti ddos is disabled once you get attacked and it will reveal your backend ip because they disable cloudflare for 7 days.

[AlexWebsites]

On my IPB sites it seems to make everything "snappier" just by using the free cdn without any optimization on the clouflare side.

I tried on an older site where I use older vbulletin, phpfox, and have some other older scripts integrated with caching and hacks, and it seemed to pause page transitions a bit. I suspect because of a conflict of the caching and http methods I'm using on that site, so I removed it and kept it live on my IPB sites.

[7Bya9K&Q]

I'm not a fan of how you have to type in www.domain.tld instead of domain.tld. I know it sounds trivial but my members actually mentioned it to me within the first 3 hours of trying it out.

Other than that, I personally do not notice an increase in speed but other members seem to, so that is nice.

[handsoffsam]

The only way to know is to measure. IMHO, one of the better tools for measuring is Web Page Test: http://www.webpagetest.org/

robert