4 ms·

This is, unfortunately, such a good point that I hadn't considered in the past.

• q3k 5y ago
  Mind you though, I'm not blindly advocating for CDNs. :) In fact, I think that the performance gain is not worth the extra complexity for most sites out there. The recent fastly outage, klarna outage, ... all show that CDNs are no silver bullet.
• glenngillen 5y ago
  A somewhat (I’m clutching approximate recollections from memory) relevant example from a customer I was helping while at a previous employer: All infrastructure ran in us-east-1. A considerable percentage (but not the majority) of their customers were based in Australia, and quite a few of them were complaining about sluggish performance. HTTP/1.1 + TLS meant connection handshake alone took over 5 seconds! Before the first useful bit of content was sent. Add in the additional pain of a web framework that was still splitting assets across multiple asset hosts (to compensate for old browser “feature” that limited the number of concurrent requests to a single domain”). Over 30 seconds of connection setup, some of it in parallels, almost all of it blocking page render because it was for HTML or dependent scripts. Add in a CDN (no caching) and edge termination meant single-digit millisecond handshakes to a POP in the closest major city. Also had the ability enable HTTP/2 at the edge without needing to change anything else which meant improved connection pooling for clients and less connection setup overhead. Backhaul connection reuse also has the benefit of pooling all requests via a specific POP rather than each individual client. We got rid of the asset host thing while we were at it. Just a CDN, no caching, and a greater than ~30000ms reduction in request times for anyone far from us-east-1!