6 ms·

As I user, I simply don't care. I repeatedly get punished for doing nothing wrong. It's almost like airport security. > What does your cdn solution look like?

As I user, I simply don't care. I repeatedly get punished for doing nothing wrong. It's almost like airport security. > What does your cdn solution look like? > Route optimization from your (single) endpoint to clients literally half a world away? And as a developer, I don't understand this newfangled obsession over CDNs either. Yes, there will be 200 ms RTT in some cases. So what? Get over it. Optimize your website to load in fewer round-trips. TCP congestion control adapts well enough to any latency. RTT only really matters in gaming and VoIP.

ehutch79 6y ago
I don't think you understand why that captcha is there in the first place then. Cloudflare prevents a bunch of crap that site operators just don't want to deal with. Especially for smaller sites that are run by one person. Dealing with a wordpress site getting hacked because you missed an update by a day, or a bulletin bored getting swarmed with bots, or some asshat ddos'ing your site because you banned them. Suddenly that site just isn't worth running. Complaining that about a thing that prevents that headache because it's a minor inconvenience to you is so self centered it boggles the mind.
- grishka 6y ago
  Yeah, so centralizing the entire internet around a black box that sees all your traffic in cleartext is clearly the right solution. /s > Dealing with a wordpress site getting hacked because you missed an update by a day Maybe don't use something this vulnerable then and rely on a third party to protect you from exploits. > or a bulletin bored getting swarmed with bots Maybe require email verification and/or a captcha when signing up or posting. Don't punish people for passive actions. Somehow, there are many forums that aren't behind cloudflare, yet there are no spam bots. > or some asshat ddos'ing your site because you banned them Sure ddos is such an everyday occurrence? I just don't understand. I run a personal website. There's literally nothing to "deal" with. I set it all up once and it works. I only have to pay for the server and for the domains on time.
  - ehutch79 6y ago
    Monocultures are always bad, but I don't see any alternative services with this level of ease of use. You're definitely overestimating the technical expertise/available time of a lot small time admins out there. You don't see bots and spam on those forums either because they are actually using cloudflare, and you're just not seeing the captcha, or because in the backend they're feeding all their posts through akismet (in plain text). I don't think you're considering how many services see your posts, even when you don't trip a captcha. email accounts are trivial to sign up for, especially for bots. I always recommend charging $1 (or local equivalent) for an account, that's a lot harder to fake. My point in all this is that bitching that site is using cloudflare to not have to deal with crap, is a self centered view. Saying "well it never happened to me, so it must never happen" is similarly self absorbed. Maybe consider that your experience is not everyones experience
    - jjav 6y ago
      > My point in all this is that bitching that site is using cloudflare to not have to deal with crap, is a self centered view. Who is serving whom here? If a business thinks it's ok to impose cloudflare inconvenience on me, the customer, for the priviledge of giving them my money, who is self centered here? The simple answer is I'll close the tab and go buy it from a competitor. I'm not playing captcha games to buy something.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - ehutch79 6y ago
        Why do I feel like you ask to speak to managers a lot?
    - NaturalPhallacy 6y ago
      >prevents a bunch of crap that site operators just don't want to deal with >I don't see any alternative services with this level of ease of use. Both of these boil down to laziness, IMHO. And for how awful they are for half the internet, that's not okay to me. Not as a user or as a developer. When a user requests a site they expect to get the site. When you utterly disregard their utterly reasonable expectation and force them to train someone's ML algorithm for free for a minute or two you utterly destroy the user experience. If that's my experience as a user, your entire site gets an instant 1/10 rating from me. I'll likely leave instantly and never return.
ehutch79 6y ago
that 200ms rtt does matter to users. it becomes very noticeable. especially when you're writing an app, not a brochure site. You need to tree shake so you're not serving a huge spa all at once. I've see much worse times for users, and a cdn absolutely help with our staff in asia dealing with our internal apps. Of course they're not always tripping up cloudflare and being shown captchas. I almost _never_ see a cloudflare captcha either... huh...
- gsich 6y ago
  What use has an app that requires a full RTT fot every buttonpress?
  - ehutch79 6y ago
    None? Why would every button press require a full rtt?
    - gsich 6y ago
      >that 200ms rtt does matter to users. it becomes very noticeable. especially when you're writing an app, not a brochure site. You need to tree shake so you're not serving a huge spa all at once. Because this implies that.
      - ehutch79 6y ago
        No it doesn't. at all. Page load speeds by themselves can be painful. Open devtools and have your browser throttle to poor 3g speeds. Try browsing around. even well optimized sites. Now try uploading a couple dozen files through an api. This is legit what some users deal with. In New York state even, you don't need to go that far to find poor connectivity. Even if all your users have awesome home connections, think sales people taveling to a client. or on site inspections of a manufacturer in a warehouse that's mostly metal and has bad wifi.
        gsich 6y ago
aseipp 6y ago
> Yes, there will be 200 ms RTT in some cases. So what? Get over it. You're missing a zero in that RTT for users in places like Asia if your server is anywhere in the west. (It's actually somewhat revealing when someone throws out a number like this without any qualification; what exactly made you conclude 200ms is the magic number?) > Optimize your website to load in fewer round-trips. TCP congestion control adapts well enough to any latency. RTT only really matters in gaming and VoIP. You don't need a very big imagination to think about cases where RTT will have significant impacts e.g. in the event you need to issue multiple sequential requests that are dependent on one another. These are unavoidable and occur often in more than just websites, but anything that e.g. uses HTTP as an API (a very simple one is something like recursively downloading dependencies.) This comes across as a classic "I don't actually understand the problem domain very well at all, but get off my lawn" answer to the problem.
- grishka 6y ago
  > You're missing a zero in that RTT for users in places like Asia if your server is anywhere in the west. Well, it does say 130 ms in here: https://www.quora.com/How-long-would-it-take-for-light-to-fly-around-the-earth https://www.quora.com/How-long-would-it-take-for-light-to-fl... And that's around the planet, to go around and end up at the same spot. In practice, with sanely-configured routes, your packets should never need to traverse more than half that distance. So, divide it by 2, then that cancels out because RTT is a measure of how long it takes for a signal to travel back and forth. You then add some time on top of that to account for buffering and processing in the various equipment along the way. > These are unavoidable and occur often in more than just websites, but anything that e.g. uses HTTP as an API (a very simple one is something like recursively downloading dependencies.) If you mean REST API requests, the kind that trigger some code to dynamically generate a response, how would a CDN solution like cloudflare help? The request still needs to get to the server and the response still needs to come back, all the way, because that's where that code runs. CDNs only really work for cacheable static content, don't they? I mean it's in the name. A blog or a news website certainly doesn't need a CDN.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ehutch79 6y ago

I don't think you understand why that captcha is there in the first place then. Cloudflare prevents a bunch of crap that site operators just don't want to deal with. Especially for smaller sites that are run by one person. Dealing with a wordpress site getting hacked because you missed an update by a day, or a bulletin bored getting swarmed with bots, or some asshat ddos'ing your site because you banned them. Suddenly that site just isn't worth running. Complaining that about a thing that prevents that headache because it's a minor inconvenience to you is so self centered it boggles the mind.

grishka 6y ago
Yeah, so centralizing the entire internet around a black box that sees all your traffic in cleartext is clearly the right solution. /s > Dealing with a wordpress site getting hacked because you missed an update by a day Maybe don't use something this vulnerable then and rely on a third party to protect you from exploits. > or a bulletin bored getting swarmed with bots Maybe require email verification and/or a captcha when signing up or posting. Don't punish people for passive actions. Somehow, there are many forums that aren't behind cloudflare, yet there are no spam bots. > or some asshat ddos'ing your site because you banned them Sure ddos is such an everyday occurrence? I just don't understand. I run a personal website. There's literally nothing to "deal" with. I set it all up once and it works. I only have to pay for the server and for the domains on time.
- ehutch79 6y ago
  Monocultures are always bad, but I don't see any alternative services with this level of ease of use. You're definitely overestimating the technical expertise/available time of a lot small time admins out there. You don't see bots and spam on those forums either because they are actually using cloudflare, and you're just not seeing the captcha, or because in the backend they're feeding all their posts through akismet (in plain text). I don't think you're considering how many services see your posts, even when you don't trip a captcha. email accounts are trivial to sign up for, especially for bots. I always recommend charging $1 (or local equivalent) for an account, that's a lot harder to fake. My point in all this is that bitching that site is using cloudflare to not have to deal with crap, is a self centered view. Saying "well it never happened to me, so it must never happen" is similarly self absorbed. Maybe consider that your experience is not everyones experience
  - jjav 6y ago
    > My point in all this is that bitching that site is using cloudflare to not have to deal with crap, is a self centered view. Who is serving whom here? If a business thinks it's ok to impose cloudflare inconvenience on me, the customer, for the priviledge of giving them my money, who is self centered here? The simple answer is I'll close the tab and go buy it from a competitor. I'm not playing captcha games to buy something.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ehutch79 6y ago
      Why do I feel like you ask to speak to managers a lot?
  - NaturalPhallacy 6y ago
    >prevents a bunch of crap that site operators just don't want to deal with >I don't see any alternative services with this level of ease of use. Both of these boil down to laziness, IMHO. And for how awful they are for half the internet, that's not okay to me. Not as a user or as a developer. When a user requests a site they expect to get the site. When you utterly disregard their utterly reasonable expectation and force them to train someone's ML algorithm for free for a minute or two you utterly destroy the user experience. If that's my experience as a user, your entire site gets an instant 1/10 rating from me. I'll likely leave instantly and never return.

ehutch79 6y ago

that 200ms rtt does matter to users. it becomes very noticeable. especially when you're writing an app, not a brochure site. You need to tree shake so you're not serving a huge spa all at once. I've see much worse times for users, and a cdn absolutely help with our staff in asia dealing with our internal apps. Of course they're not always tripping up cloudflare and being shown captchas. I almost _never_ see a cloudflare captcha either... huh...

gsich 6y ago
What use has an app that requires a full RTT fot every buttonpress?
- ehutch79 6y ago
  None? Why would every button press require a full rtt?
  - gsich 6y ago
    >that 200ms rtt does matter to users. it becomes very noticeable. especially when you're writing an app, not a brochure site. You need to tree shake so you're not serving a huge spa all at once. Because this implies that.
    - ehutch79 6y ago
      No it doesn't. at all. Page load speeds by themselves can be painful. Open devtools and have your browser throttle to poor 3g speeds. Try browsing around. even well optimized sites. Now try uploading a couple dozen files through an api. This is legit what some users deal with. In New York state even, you don't need to go that far to find poor connectivity. Even if all your users have awesome home connections, think sales people taveling to a client. or on site inspections of a manufacturer in a warehouse that's mostly metal and has bad wifi.
      - gsich 6y ago

aseipp 6y ago

> Yes, there will be 200 ms RTT in some cases. So what? Get over it. You're missing a zero in that RTT for users in places like Asia if your server is anywhere in the west. (It's actually somewhat revealing when someone throws out a number like this without any qualification; what exactly made you conclude 200ms is the magic number?) > Optimize your website to load in fewer round-trips. TCP congestion control adapts well enough to any latency. RTT only really matters in gaming and VoIP. You don't need a very big imagination to think about cases where RTT will have significant impacts e.g. in the event you need to issue multiple sequential requests that are dependent on one another. These are unavoidable and occur often in more than just websites, but anything that e.g. uses HTTP as an API (a very simple one is something like recursively downloading dependencies.) This comes across as a classic "I don't actually understand the problem domain very well at all, but get off my lawn" answer to the problem.

grishka 6y ago
> You're missing a zero in that RTT for users in places like Asia if your server is anywhere in the west. Well, it does say 130 ms in here: https://www.quora.com/How-long-would-it-take-for-light-to-fly-around-the-earth https://www.quora.com/How-long-would-it-take-for-light-to-fl... And that's around the planet, to go around and end up at the same spot. In practice, with sanely-configured routes, your packets should never need to traverse more than half that distance. So, divide it by 2, then that cancels out because RTT is a measure of how long it takes for a signal to travel back and forth. You then add some time on top of that to account for buffering and processing in the various equipment along the way. > These are unavoidable and occur often in more than just websites, but anything that e.g. uses HTTP as an API (a very simple one is something like recursively downloading dependencies.) If you mean REST API requests, the kind that trigger some code to dynamically generate a response, how would a CDN solution like cloudflare help? The request still needs to get to the server and the response still needs to come back, all the way, because that's where that code runs. CDNs only really work for cacheable static content, don't they? I mean it's in the name. A blog or a news website certainly doesn't need a CDN.
- joshuamorton 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]