Does HN really have that many lurkers that it can can cause a hug-of-death on a website behind cloudflare like this??
It seems only a privacy leak tool now.
1000 requests / min @ 10ms limit / request. That's 16 requests per second. Any reasonable CMS, wiki or blogging tool should be able to do one request in 62.5ms. Add on cacheing for non logged in users and nginx serving anything static, that's less than the power a $5 VPS provides.
At these rates, the case for Cloudflare is a lot less than it was.
there a fine line between DDOS from bots and 30k real users accessing your site at the same time
cloudflare do not provide resource for the latter
Blog posts don’t change much. Even if your rendering code is horrendously slow (though, why?), you can just cache the resulting html and serve it up with each request. Or slap nginx in front of your web server locally and let that deal with the load. ‘Course you’ll need your http headers set correctly, but you needed that anyway for cloudflare.
Your server has to be pretty badly configured for a personal blog to run out of CPU handling requests.
That basically means it starts after the connection was established by the proxy (cloudflare) and terminates before the response is delivered to the client.
Doing the whole round trip within 65ms is actually pretty challenging, even if you are requesting over the wire. It would mean you have maybe 10-20 Ms to query data from the database and process them to html or json. Any kind of delay while querying the database is going to ruin that.
If you had a 65ms in the application, you would probably get a round trip average of something above 90, likely closer to 150 then 90.
If you cache the response yourself (or use nginx), the server should be responding to queries in <1ms.
The message would've been different if it was cached.
(I'm the tech lead for Workers.)
I wouldn't bet on an average dev being able to set up and configure nginx + Cloudflare correctly.
>Course you’ll need your http headers set correctly, but you needed that anyway for cloudflare
Not if you don't use CF to cache "dynamic" content.
I spent a colossal amount of my childhood and teens playing browser-based games and have zero regrets!
However:
1. It would run in a single location in the world, whereas Workers (even on the free tier) will run in Cloudflare locations all around the world, close to the end user, reducing latency.
2. If you're going to compare against a $5 VPS, the $5 Workers paid tier is probably a better comparison? It can instantly scale to millions of requests per second.
(Disclosure: I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)
As a comparison, that's akin to a person walking 4 km/day vs. flying 4,000 km/day,
It's still not a great comparison as the $5 VPS is already paid for. But to take it as you suggest, I agree it's up to the website owner whether they prefer to have 4km/day workers who can sometimes clone themselves in different parts of the world but only for a limited time until they costmore, or a 4000/day flying suit.
Still a bit apples to oranges.
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#d...
Most site, on simple page like CMS or wiki should be static. And serving it from cache even a $5 VPS could do a few hundred page view per second, or 1000+ Request per second. I dont believe HN generate these amount of traffic. From previous note on other HN front page page it is actually much smaller than most expected. Something like IIRC 30K to 50K Page views - over the course of 24 hours.
Mind you, at that point you serve more requests slower, before that you don't even notice a latency increase.
Just shows again we really don't need CDN for most things. Just keep it simple.