A super fast website using Cloudflare workers | Hacker News Reader

A super fast website using Cloudflare workers

crazyfast.website

124 pointskilroy12380 comments

The site is indeed instant, those performance tricks does work (inline everything, botli compression, cache, edge network like cdn), BUT the site is also completely empty, it shows nothing except a placeholder.

Things can easily change when you start adding functionalities. One site I like to visit to remind myself of how fast usable websites can be, is Dlangs forum. I just navigate around to get the experience.

https://forum.dlang.org

> One site I like to visit to remind myself of how fast usable websites can be, is Dlangs forum. I just navigate around to get the experience

Interestingly, for me each page load takes a noticeably long delay. Once it starts loading all of the content snaps in almost at once. It’s slower to get there than the other forums I visit though.

I made a fast usable product page recently https://www.buyadagger.com/

Doesn't work without Javascript?

Correct, all the filtering is done locally in the browser, and the deploy is purely static.

If PSA had let me use affiliate links, I was planning to do the work to SSR in a Cloudflare Worker, but they declined and I decided to call the project where it was.

It's crazy how unusable most gun websites are for browsing what's available. This though is the perfect example of what I really want when browsing catalogues.

Some sites can be very simple and yet quite useful. For example https://rawdiary.com/ always impresses me with its speed.

Another super super fast website is https://www.mcmaster.com/

One time I decided to check how much faster really you can go while still getting decent usability out of "simple blog platform" type of webapp.

End result, written in go, did around 80-200us to generate post page and 150-200us (on cheap linode VPS... probably far faster on my dev machine) for index page with a bunch of posts.

Core was basically

* pre-compile the templates

* load blogpost into RAM, pre-compile and cache the markdown part

cache could be easily kicked off to redis or similar but it's just text, there is no need

Fun stuff I hit around:

* runtime template loading takes a lot just for the type-casting; the template framework I used was basically thin veneer over Go code that got compiled to Go code when ran

* it was fast enough that multiple Write() vs one was noticeable on flame graph

* smart caching will get you everywhere if you get cache invalidation right, making the "slow" parts not matter; unless you're running years of content and gigabytes of text you probably don't want to cache it anywhere else than in RAM or at the very least have over-memory cache be second tier.

The project itself was rewrite of same thing that I tried in Perl(using Mojolicious) and even there it achieved single digit ms.

And it feels so... weird, using webpage that just reacts with speed that the well-written native app has. Whole design process was going against the ye olde "don't optimize prematurely" and it was complete success, looking at performance in each iteration of component paid off really quickly. We got robbed of so much time from badly running websites.

I had my page served with Go and it was instant, 100% speed score. Then I moved the static content to a CDN and it's slower now, only 96% speed. However, the question is really how fast the page is when it comes under heavy load.

> First visit: ~30ms. Real JavaScript executes at the edge.

It appears to have static content. Why does it need any JS at all?

Because OP let an LLM generate the text and couldn't be bothered to measure :)

"At the edge" means "on a server located close to where you are". It's used to serve the HTML.

Looks like the only JavaScript running on the client is for installing the service worker and some Cloudflare tracking junk.

Right, but any old CDN can do that. Why does it need CF workers?

Workers doesn’t require JS to serve static content though. You upload it as a static asset and it does it for you.

Thank goodness it’s real JavaScript and not that knockoff js unscrupulous vendors are using to cut costs

My blog directory/search engine [1] runs on Cloudflare workers as well. I was able to get pretty good results, too. For example, the listing of 1200+ blogs [2], each with 5 latest posts, loads in ~500ms. A single post with a list of related posts, loads in ~200ms. Yeah, it's still a lot, but it includes all the normal web app logic like auth middlewares, loading user settings, and states; everything is rendered server-side, no rich frontend code (apart from htmx for a couple of buttons to make simple one-off requests like "subscribe to blog" or "add to favorites"). A static page (like /about) usually loads in ~100ms.

This is a bit stochastic because of regions and dynamic allocation of resources. So, e.g. if you're the first user from a large georgraphic region to visit the website in the last several hours, your first load will be longer.

My other project (a blog platform) contains a lot of optimizations, so posts [3] load pretty much as fast as that example from the thread, i.e. 60-70ms.

1. https://minifeed.net/

2. https://minifeed.net/blogs

3. https://rakhim.exotext.com/but-what-if-i-really-want-a-faste...

For static content this isn't fast.

For a dynamic service, well.. maybe implement something of interest and then we can discuss.

> Immutable caching Cache-Control:max-age=31536000, immutable

Why brag about how it's not static content, if you're just going to tell the browser to cache it until the end of time anyways?

> ~2.5KB Brotli Smaller than most images.

Brotli is so 2024. Use zstd. (73.62%, I know. Slightly worse compression ratio, I know that too.)

Do browsers use a custom dictionary for zstd (I don’t think so since I can precompress zstd content server-side)?

Brotli was designed for html compression so despite/while being a relatively inferior algorithm, its stock dictionary is all html/css/js-trained/optimized. Chrome/Blink recently added support for seeing content compressed with a bespoke dictionary, but that only works for massive sites that have a heavily skewed new/returning visit ratio (because of the cost of shipping both the compressed content and the dictionary).

Long story short, I could see br being better than zstd for basic web purposes.

This is interesting and need to look into.

I decided to go check my website’s PageSpeed and I do have a 100/100/100/100 with pretty lots of content on the homepage including 6 separate thumbnails.

My site is on a straight path, no tricks — Github Pages Served to the Internet by Cloudflare.

These are not impressive numbers and, obviously, browser cache is fast.

Pretty much any small payload/non-javascript site is going to render very quickly (and instantly from cache) making SSL time be the long pole.

well yes alright but it would be more impressive if there was actually something interesting there to see

Speed: 217ms 289ms

I have 5G network :)

Also, heard multiple times that edge network can be worse, because if you're low prio and other part of globe is not busy, you get it routed in worst possible way.

Getting a site to load quickly isn't that difficult from a technical perspective. You just need to strip out everything that slows it down. If you can deliver a page of HTML and inlined CSS that renders without JS or images then your site will be fast (or at least it'll be perceived as fast, which is fine.) So long as you're using some fairly reputable hosting infrastructure (AWS, Azure, Google, etc), and if you're rendering on the server you're not doing silly things on the hot path, then you don't need to worry about speed.

The hard part when it comes to site optimization is persuading various stakeholders who want GTM, Clarity, Dynatrace, DataDog, New Relic, 7 different ad retargeters, Meta, X, and probably AI as well now that a fast loading website is more important than the data they get from whichever of those things they happen to be interested in.

For any individual homepage where that stuff isn't an issue because the owner is making all the decisions, it's fair to say that if your site loads slowly it's because you chose to make it slow. For any large business, it's because 'the business' chose to make it slow.

Exactly. My site loads fast with no images causes it is a demo site. Sure Jan!

What does this page do that needs workers though? Looks like it could be static HTML to me.

I think most sites could either be static HTML and use a CDN, or they need a database and pretty much have to be located in one place anyway.

It's quite hard to think of use cases where that isn't true.

Speed:

- 3942ms

- 4281ms

Guess it depends on your region. This is from East-Asia.

hmm, it seems the last static site I did is slightly faster https://nissestyrelsen.dk/ but probably just because it's hosted in country near me, if I was somewhere else probably much worse. Not that I care that much to really research it, I figure it's fast enough and just a funny idea.

my luck HN gonna crash it.

Wish more pages were as fast as this, despite this site’s simplicity… In particular GitHub could really benefit from less bloat and faster rendering.

It's not fast.

Am I crazy? Why do I feel like all the text on the page was written by a LLM? I started seeing this everywhere

another trick is adding speculation rules on MPA sites. so when you hover over a link the page gets prerendered. For example, my initial page takes ~80ms, but navigating to other pages take 20ms

    prerender: [
      {
         where: { href_matches: '/*' },
         eagerness: 'moderate'
      }
    ]

That doesn't work on Safari, FF, and Brave, but you could do something like this:

https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton/blob/main/www/src/_as...

Most adblockers/privacy extensions disable this.

uBlock Origin does it by default for instance.

Do they block <link rel=prefetch> completely?

On Brave, the workaround on that linked snippet bypasses their blocking.

Well, uBlock Origin sets network.prefetch-next=false and network.dns.disablePrefetch=true, so yes.

The reason is that browser prefetching may hit URLs that were intended to be blocked.

The perfect lighthouse score might have changed since this was last updated. Am seeing 97% on accessibility.

Over 800ms is not even a little fast. I’m on WiFi to ADSL, lights static websites are way faster than that.

I still appreciate that you shared this even though other comments are correct that there isn’t much content on the page. Frankly speaking, more devs should put more thought into performance.

I’m currently working on a small e-commerce store for myself, written in SvelteKit (frontend) and Go (backend) and one of my core objectives is to make it fast. Not crazy fast, but looking for TTFB < 50-70ms for an average Polish user. Will definitely share it once it’s public.

First load took 3.8 seconds for me.

I believe CF Page is faster.

CF pages is built on top of workers, you can serve static html assets from either of them too.

"TL;DR: This isn't a cached HTML file. Real code runs at the edge in ~30ms. After your first visit:~4ms from browser cache!"

Maybe add some dynamic feature for the demo so that we don't need to trust you and be surprised at a nothingburger.

  Speed:
  74ms
  241ms

… LOL …

These 30 ms and 4 ms numbers were typical Apache to Netscape from MAE East and MAE West in 1998. Twenty five years and orders of magnitude more computing later? Same numbers.

I know, right? Almost 30 years and no progress in the speed of light? What are all these engineers even doing?

Right right! Like we used to have concord back in the day and we are just getting slower innit.

For real

I believe that FTL communication (if it's achievable) will start out in data centers at small scales. Perhaps millimeters.

Possibly as an extension of Quantum Computing where some probabilistic asymmetry can be taken advantage of. The QC itself might not be faster than classical computing, but the FTL comms could improve memory and cache access.

Also MetaGoog will use it to serve up hyper personalized ads in their Gemini based Metaverse.

But now it's that fast from almost everywhere on the planet, with nearly zero effort from the developer. We've been limited by light speed here, not compute.

I get 381ms/401ms on first load and not the claimed ~30ms. I'm not really sure what the point is here though. CDNs and browser cache headers work? Static sites are fast to paint?

Yeah, I'm not seeing fast uncached times either. I usually hit Cloudflare's Miami datacenter, which is only about 200 miles and very low latency. But I'm seeing 200+ms on this site right now.

Most cloudflare products are very slow / offer very poor performance. I was surprised by this but that’s just how it is. It basically negates any claimed performance advantage.

Durable objects, r2 as well as tunnel have been particularly poor performing in my experience. Workers has not been a great experience either.

R2 in particular has been the slowest / highest latency s3 alternative I ever had experience with, falling behind backblaze b2, wasabi and even hetzner’s object storage.

got 12/31ms and 6/13ms cached so Cloudlfare muat not be that slow in Europe after all... ;)

I also got initial load times in that range.

The site should be faster, though. I’ve had a small CF workers project that works correctly with quick load times.

nah, most sites are fat enough that both bandwidth and compute is the limit.

Getting it closer can save you 50-150ms, but if whole load takes 1s+ that's minuscule

I only meant in this example. I agree, sites in general are fat.

Not to mention that device count went up million fold.

Great point!

The circumference of Earth at the equator is about 40,000 km and the speed of light is about 300,000 km/s. The appropriate division results in about 0.13 s.

That seems to track. The vast majority of requests won’t go half way around the Earth, so maybe halving that time at 0.06 seems like a reasonable target.

Light travels at about 0.69c in fiber optic cables (c being the speed of light in vacuum, which, as you stated, is about 300,000 km/s).

Ah yes I forgot about that. Thanks for the correction.

Physics. It's literally just physics.

And with Workers they're accessible from hundreds of locations around the world so you can get this sort of speed from almost anywhere.

Speed: 350ms 1330ms

Is the site getting slower?

"A super fast static website using Cloudflare workers"

Add imagery and see if you get the same results. I expect you could achieve such with Base64 but the caveat would be larger file sizes.

Yeah, it's really quick because there is pretty much nothing on it

I agree. Not impressed, frankly. Cloudflare workers is just even-more localized CDN, and the benefit is so tiny that it's not worth the investment nor maintenance costs. (I wrote extensively about this non-thing here: https://wskpf.com/takes/you-dont-need-a-cdn-for-seo). My site (https://wskpf.com), which has way more elements and, err, stuff, loads in 50ms, and unless you are superman or an atomic clock, you wouldn't care. same lighthouse scores as this one, but with no CDN nor cloudflare workers, and it actually has stuff on it.

TCP performance gets quite poor over long distances. CDNs are very helpful if you're trying to make your site work well far away from your servers.

I think the bottleneck is rarely CDN. Think about it - my server sits in Germany. My target audience is in the US. My latency to the west coast is 150ms. I can see it being a big thing in competitive online game, but for website load performance it's less than the blink of an eye. The real bottleneck is usually poorly configured page or some bloated JS.

Your site took over a second to load for me from Brazil. Are you sure CDNs are that worthless?

I do, because the 120ms latency that CDN solves is a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.5 seconds (desktop) or 8 seconds (mobile) it takes for the average website to load almost entirely due to un-optimized images and poor code (based on https://www.hostinger.com/in/tutorials/website-load-time-sta...)

next stop: lets install nextjs and give it a try shall we?

Is this real?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com