4 ms·

But wouldn't a site be faster if cachable requests go to a cdn, and no un-cachable requests go directly to origin with no forwarding at the cdn layer?

zamadatix 6y ago
When I say "If a CDN is critical to your site's performance you should put your site on it" I do mean to say "put (those parts of) your site on it" not "if 51% of your site should be on a CDN put the other 49% as well". But to your question though even un-cacheable content can be "those parts of". There are products from CDNs like https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo/ which combine CDN cache tiering with higher tier network transport to origin servers for all cache misses (or uncacheable content). Again though, it depends on if it's critical to your site's performance or not. If you don't have a bunch of uncacheable content, that content doesn't need the absolute best transport, or the time/money could improve some other part of the site speed more then it's not critical to your site's performance.
ehnto 6y ago
Only if the CDN serves assets faster than the origin can. That's not necessarily true by default. Not to mention, if the speed is okay for the initial request, why not the following requests? The final nail in the coffin for me is that CDNs are a shared resource, if your CDN is getting heavy traffic or otherwise suffering, it becomes your slow point, while your site is fine. I just don't see any upsides worth the tradeoffs. If you have scale that demands some serious content distribution, that is different, I would argue you shouldn't be relying on public shared CDNs then even moreso. Pay for a CDN service or roll your own.
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  CDNs can almost always serve assets faster than the origin can. Because PoPs are closer and transfer speed ramp rate scales to latency, the further away a server is, the longer it takes the download to ramp up to full speed. This is especially relevant when talking about smaller resources like javascript, css, and small or optimized images, and webfonts.

zamadatix 6y ago

When I say "If a CDN is critical to your site's performance you should put your site on it" I do mean to say "put (those parts of) your site on it" not "if 51% of your site should be on a CDN put the other 49% as well". But to your question though even un-cacheable content can be "those parts of". There are products from CDNs like https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo/ which combine CDN cache tiering with higher tier network transport to origin servers for all cache misses (or uncacheable content). Again though, it depends on if it's critical to your site's performance or not. If you don't have a bunch of uncacheable content, that content doesn't need the absolute best transport, or the time/money could improve some other part of the site speed more then it's not critical to your site's performance.

ehnto 6y ago

Only if the CDN serves assets faster than the origin can. That's not necessarily true by default. Not to mention, if the speed is okay for the initial request, why not the following requests? The final nail in the coffin for me is that CDNs are a shared resource, if your CDN is getting heavy traffic or otherwise suffering, it becomes your slow point, while your site is fine. I just don't see any upsides worth the tradeoffs. If you have scale that demands some serious content distribution, that is different, I would argue you shouldn't be relying on public shared CDNs then even moreso. Pay for a CDN service or roll your own.

MrStonedOne 6y ago
CDNs can almost always serve assets faster than the origin can. Because PoPs are closer and transfer speed ramp rate scales to latency, the further away a server is, the longer it takes the download to ramp up to full speed. This is especially relevant when talking about smaller resources like javascript, css, and small or optimized images, and webfonts.