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Comment by l5870uoo9y | Hacker News Reader

I am in the process of porting my web app[1] from NextJS hosted at Vercel to Astro/React hosted at Cloudflare, and something that particularly surprises me is that I can render a web app on every request at “the edge” and have response times of 100-200ms. That is almost as fast as fully static pages.

I have also definitely noticed an improvement in Cloudflare Worker over the last few weeks; cold starts have practically disappeared, and they are significantly more stable in terms of response times.

[1]: https://app.sqlai.ai/

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Hello! How are you collecting your edge workload to the database? Are you using cloudflare’s database?

I’ve wanted to try out this edge hosting thing but because of the amount of round trips involved between the application and the database, the application performs worse on the edge.

Thanks!

The database is hosted on Railway. I have enabled Smart Placement that should, depending on request time, automatically use an endpoint closer to the database to speed it up. When requesting a route that includes a database request, the response time on the US east coast is around 200ms and closer to 1000ms in Denmark. I am hoping that the Smart Placement will work better when I go live with the app (still in beta) and that it mainly needs more traffic to calculate optimal endpoint placement.

So a remote, authenticated DB connection over the internet? How many db queries per page generation does that generally work out as?

My app isn't database heavy; most pages renders without a single database call (user information stored in cookie) and the pages that do call the database contain maximum one call. Other data, like database schemas and subscription status, are requested in the background directly from the browser so it doesn't stall page rendering.

Have you given Hyperdrive[0] a try? In theory, it should improve performance in your use case where you have a central database (Railway) being connected to from the Edge (your Workers).

It moves the DB connection logic closer to your Workers, pools connections, and can also cache queries.

(Disclaimer: I work for Cloudflare, but on an unrelated team. Not personally used Hyperdrive, but heard good things!)

[0]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/hyperdrive/

It actually looks very interesting, but my app is not particularly affected by database query time, but rather by the time spent on the various AI generations.

C'mon - static pages are like 10ms or less. 200ms is already noticeable, not-instant for humans. We have 5-10x faster hardware and 10x slower websites ;)

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