1. SSL is terminated near the user - the multiple round trips to do a TLS handshake for a user in Sydney will never leave the city, instead of having to travers

1. SSL is terminated near the user - the multiple round trips to do a TLS handshake for a user in Sydney will never leave the city, instead of having to traverse the pacific. 2. Static content is served locally from their CDN. Same thing, your JPEG served to a guy mombasa is coming from a few miles away, not half a world away. 3. If your clients are using old browsers without keepalive, CloudFlare will still keep connections alive from their local endpoint to your servers - making the new-connection cost only occur on the first couple of hops. 4. For dynamic content you can use a special proxy they created which keeps a synchronized cache with the far end so it can ships diffs. If you generate a page thats mostly similar to another page it can just send "Same As Cache Object 124567 except Line 147 says "Welcome chubot" instead of "Welcome orionhenry". A significant percentage of dynamic responses can traverse the world as a single TCP packet. 5. Their devs are really ruthless about keeping the crypto certs as small as possible, with the goal of all handshakes taking a single packet per step.