Trying out cloudflare
> This site is hosted on Dreamhost which is pretty neat hosting with just
a minor problem for me. They are based in America, on the west coast
this can make my ping times to server quite slow. I'm in Norfolk in the
UK. It varies a bit but sometimes (on bad days when and when Americans
are online) its been up to 1000 ms . Usually its better than that, at
the moment its 175ms. Previously I added the pictures on my other site
adamwilson.info to amazon S3 to bring them closer to the users. Each
page on the site features quite a few images so using amazon to bring
the images to a server near by speeded up the page load times quite a bit.
Note: Since I wrote this I had some issues with this cloudflare losing their dns connection to dreamhost and the original site. So I've shifted it off cloudflare for a bit whilst I figure that out.
So when I saw cloudflare I was quite interested to see how much difference it would make to the loading time of this site. I ran some simples tests before and after to see what difference it made along with a test of the same site on my local machine for comparison. I've bunged them in here if they are of any use to you.
this is the site on my testing server on localhost
To be honest this is really excessive for this site, its really simple and I don't pay for bandwidth anyway but it seems better to try stuff out on your own site rather than on a clients. Its free though so no bother to try out and if your on dreamhost you don't even have to mess with dns, only tick a box and let them do it.
Some cloudflare oddities : if you add a subdomain they say they have added the root domain so you do add geeklog.adamwilson.info, they say thankyou for adding adamwilson.info. Ignore this. Also they see themselves as a security layer for your site. I wasn't particularly interested in that, there aren't comments on this site and its not really something i'm worried about hackers on. By default they block certain ip's with a captcha challenge. That seemed a bit unfriendly to me so I turned it off you can tweak this how you want. You can turn it for your admin area or some other bit. They also do email obfuscation If your not already doing that. There are a lot of different features including analytics. Its quite neat.
Note: Since I wrote this I had some issues with this cloudflare losing their dns connection to dreamhost and the original site. So I've shifted it off cloudflare for a bit whilst I figure that out.
So when I saw cloudflare I was quite interested to see how much difference it would make to the loading time of this site. I ran some simples tests before and after to see what difference it made along with a test of the same site on my local machine for comparison. I've bunged them in here if they are of any use to you.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
online at Dreamhost pre cloudfare
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Benchmarking geeklog.adamwilson.info (be patient).....done
Server Software: Apache
Server Hostname: geeklog.adamwilson.info
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 12018 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 8.023 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1242420 bytes
HTML transferred: 1218627 bytes
Requests per second: 12.46 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 802.320 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 80.232 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 151.22 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 174 182 4.7 181 202
Processing: 403 590 284.8 501 1608
Waiting: 216 346 289.9 263 1414
Total: 580 772 286.3 692 1792
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 692
66% 779
75% 792
80% 799
90% 848
95% 1748
98% 1779
99% 1792
100% 1792 (longest request)
this is the site on my testing server on localhost
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
On my mac Toby
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Macintosh:~ Toby$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://geeklog.adamwilson.info.toby/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking geeklog.adamwilson.info.toby (be patient).....done
Server Software: Apache/2.2.21
Server Hostname: geeklog.adamwilson.info.toby
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 8655 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 1.633 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 895700 bytes
HTML transferred: 865500 bytes
Requests per second: 61.23 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 163.327 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 16.333 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 535.55 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 1.8 0 13
Processing: 64 159 33.2 160 253
Waiting: 64 153 30.6 154 241
Total: 65 159 33.0 160 254
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 160
66% 167
75% 172
80% 177
90% 204
95% 229
98% 242
99% 254
100% 254 (longest request)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
On cloudflare
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last login: Sun Apr 8 11:17:09 on console
Macintosh:~ Toby$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://geeklog.adamwilson.info/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking geeklog.adamwilson.info (be patient).....done
Server Software: cloudflare-nginx
Server Hostname: geeklog.adamwilson.info
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 12020 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 6.619 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1265229 bytes
HTML transferred: 1214025 bytes
Requests per second: 15.11 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 661.933 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 66.193 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 186.66 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 34 39 3.3 38 54
Processing: 255 604 519.0 349 2091
Waiting: 210 493 508.0 228 1973
Total: 293 643 520.2 390 2139
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 390
66% 456
75% 892
80% 1019
90% 1542
95% 2075
98% 2120
99% 2139
100% 2139 (longest request)
another site on same dreamhost hosting account no cloudflare
-----------------------------------------------------------
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 173.442/173.796/174.234/0.329 ms
this site with cloudflare
------------------------------------------------------------
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 31.984/33.248/34.279/0.721 ms
To be honest this is really excessive for this site, its really simple and I don't pay for bandwidth anyway but it seems better to try stuff out on your own site rather than on a clients. Its free though so no bother to try out and if your on dreamhost you don't even have to mess with dns, only tick a box and let them do it.
Some cloudflare oddities : if you add a subdomain they say they have added the root domain so you do add geeklog.adamwilson.info, they say thankyou for adding adamwilson.info. Ignore this. Also they see themselves as a security layer for your site. I wasn't particularly interested in that, there aren't comments on this site and its not really something i'm worried about hackers on. By default they block certain ip's with a captcha challenge. That seemed a bit unfriendly to me so I turned it off you can tweak this how you want. You can turn it for your admin area or some other bit. They also do email obfuscation If your not already doing that. There are a lot of different features including analytics. Its quite neat.
/ Adam