Previously, I had Bunn圜DN to FPC this blog via its global PoP locations however the benefits of Cloudflare’s full features meant keeping it on the main domain.
UPDATE March 2022: I’ve been using Bunny CDN (affiliate credit link) for statics on sub-domain and using Cloudflare to cover the main domain caching.
Argo is priced at $5/domain monthly, plus $0.10 per GB of transfer. Since moving full page caching to Nginx and using Cloudflare Argo, the blog now has better overall response times for BOTH cached and uncached requests.Ībove: This Shows my monthly Cloudflare bandwidth usage.
Over the past year, with full-page caching enabled, I found Cloudflare’s cache had to be cleared either in part (new posts, categories, tags, and the front page) or the entire cache (and/or dev mode) during design changes or other global reasons. This is more convenient than using Cloudflare FPC with a TTL of 4 hours or whatever the previous setting was.
Since there’s no FPC enabled, there’s no need to clear Cloudflare’s cache. This blog aimed to set Cloudflare’s edge servers to the max of one month TTL (time to live/expire) for statics. FPC could still be enabled here, but I prefer the flexibility with it off. This means all page requests, even uncached, are fast.Ībove: My current Cloudflare page rules. With Cloudflare Argo, I used Nginx w/ fastcgi_cache for FPC. Without Cloudflare Argo, I used Cloudflare’s FPC (Full Page Caching) via page rules for a 300ms reduction in cached response times. The response time spike was due to my WordPress admin back-end activity. See below graph for Nginx’s response time for this blog).Ībove: Screen crop of Nginx Amplify graphs (this blog). TTFB includes network transit time (which Argo’s Smart Routing optimizes) and processing time on your server (which Argo does not affect. TTFB measures the delay between sending a request to your server and receiving the first byte in response. With page loads for this blog hovering around the one-second mark, the reduction of 300 milliseconds of response time in Europe and Asia is welcomed.Ībove: Each circle represents a Cloudflare network location. The larger the circle, the more traffic is being served via that location. If all of your web traffic is US-based, you will still see around a 20% response time improvement depending on your existing TTFB. In short, if you have a significant chunk of international traffic,
This was one of the reasons why I decided to give Cloudflare Argo a test run. With the UK, Germany, and France at the top. The blue and orange series represent the before and after.Īlthough the vast majority of visitors to this blog are from the United States, almost a third of the visitors are from Europe. Argo propagates content via Cloudflare’s 250+ server locations.Ībove: Histogram of Time To First Byte (TTFB). This provides them with real-time network intelligence and the true speed of network paths.Ĭloudflare’s Argo smart routing algorithm uses this information to route traffic across the fastest paths available while maintaining secure connections and eliminating excess latency. The Cloudflare company routes 20% of all internet traffic. Slow loading times and connection timeouts increase the likelihood of poor user experience.