What are the optimum settings for Invision on CloudFlare?

[AA15]

What are the optimum settings for an Invision community using CloudFlare for best performance? Like ..

 

What should my caching level be?

• No query string
• Ignore query string
• Standard

Browser Cache TTL

• Respect existing headers
• 4 hours
• 4 days
• Something else (please specify)

[rfcontreras]

Good question..

 

[Makoto]

Your cache level should definitively be Standard, the default setting. Using anything else will break IPS' cache busting feature, which is needed to recache static assets.

Cache TTL can come down to a matter of preference. Considering important resources like CSS and Javascript assets are cache busted as needed, it's safe to use values up to even 30 days if you so wish.

The potential concern with this is, if image attachments are deleted but left embedded into posts as an example, they will still display as cached in the users browser for however long you set this to. So, it can be a minor privacy concern, as IPS currently does not automatically remove image embeds from posts when attachments are deleted from the users control panel.

That's really the only thing to keep in mind. Otherwise, I recommend at least 7-days personally.

 

Outside of these, there are several useful features Cloudflare provides that I recommend taking advantage of.

Note, some of these features are Pro only, but if you're a Free user, use the ones that aren't. They help if even a little bit and there's no reason not to.

Now, if you have a high traffic website and you can afford it, I personally believe it's worth upgrading to the Pro plan.

 

But to get started with the optimizations, under the Speed tab, go to Optimization and make sure these settings are enabled.

Polish with WebP enabled can be hugely useful if you have a lot of PNG attachments / avatar uploads on your site, as WebP can provide substantially better lossless image compression compared to PNG.

Auto Minify is disabled by default and you should enable it. The actual performance improvement is small, but it's still an improvement with no risks, so there's no reason not to use it.

Brotli, again, small improvements, but no risks and and no reason not to use it for clients that support it. All the overhead involved in performing the compression is handled by Cloudflare here after all.

Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritization and TCP Turbo are again zero risk performance improvements and if you have access to them you should enable them.

Mirage can be great in theory for mobile browsers by automatically optimizing images on slow networks. It's in beta, but I do definitely recommend enabling this. Roughly half the of the internets traffic today is mobile. These optimizations can yield huge benefits to your users.

Rocket Loader I do not recommend enabling, as it can cause functional and perceptional issues with IPB. It makes things look and act in strange ways, and can potentially just break things. Rocket Loader is one of those things that works well for some sites, but is awful for others. It's not great for IPB in my experience. I say the same for PageSpeed JS optimizations and so on as well.

Under the Network tab, make sure these settings are enabled.

All of these are, again, zero risk performance optimizations. No reason not to use them.

Argo tunnel can potentially be useful as well, but note that it can be extremely expensive depending on your bandwidth requirements. It's an additional $0.10/GB of bandwidth. Do not enable it until you have at least a months worth of bandwidth analytics logged from Cloudflare so you have an idea of how much you can expect to pay if you enable this feature.

Edited September 30, 2020 by Makoto