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If you have hundreds of millions of pageviews, go with a trusted party - someone you actually pay money to - like Cloudflare, Akamai, or any major hosting / clo

If you have hundreds of millions of pageviews, go with a trusted party - someone you actually pay money to - like Cloudflare, Akamai, or any major hosting / cloud party. But not to increase cache hit rate (what CDNs were originally intended for), but to reduce latency and move resources to the edge.

bawolff 2y ago
Does it even reduce latency that much (unless you have already squeezed latency out of everything else that you can)? Presumably your backend at this point is not ultra optimized. If you send a link header and using http/2 the browser will download the js file while your backend is doing its thing. I'm doubtful that moving js to the edge would help that much in such a situation unless the client is on the literal other side of the world. There of course comes a point where it does matter, i just think the cross over point is way later than people expect.
- smaudet 2y ago
  > Does it even reduce latency that much Absolutely: https://wondernetwork.com/pings/ https://wondernetwork.com/pings/ Stockholm <-> Tokyo is at least 400ms here, anytime you have multi-national sites having a CDN is important. For your local city, not so much (and of course you won't even see it locally).
  - bawolff 2y ago
    I understand that ping times are different when geolocated. My point was that in fairly typical scenarios (worst cases are going to be worse) it would be hidden by backend latency since the fetch could be concurrent with link headers or http 103. Devil in details of course.
- a2800276 2y ago
  I'm so glad to find some sane voices here! I mean, sure, if you're really serving a lot of traffic to Mombasa, akamai will reduce latency. You could also try to avoid multi megabyte downloads for a simple page.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    Content: 50KB Images: 1MB Javascript: 35MB Fonts: 200KB Someone who is good at the internet please help me budget this. My bounce rate is dying.
    - jenadine 2y ago
      What's all that JavaScript for?
      - ozzcer 2y ago
        Cookie banner
    - bawolff 2y ago
      While there are lots of bad examples out there - keep in mind its not quite that straight forward as it can make a big difference whether those resources are on the critical path that blocks first paint or not.
  - josephg 2y ago
    It’s not an either or thing. Do both. Good sites are small and download locally. The CDN will work better (and be cheaper to use!) if you slim down your assets as well.
akira2501 2y ago
> But not to increase cache hit rate (what CDNs were originally intended for) Was it really cache hit rate of the client or cache hit rate against the backend?
- matsur 2y ago
  Both.

bawolff 2y ago

Does it even reduce latency that much (unless you have already squeezed latency out of everything else that you can)? Presumably your backend at this point is not ultra optimized. If you send a link header and using http/2 the browser will download the js file while your backend is doing its thing. I'm doubtful that moving js to the edge would help that much in such a situation unless the client is on the literal other side of the world. There of course comes a point where it does matter, i just think the cross over point is way later than people expect.

smaudet 2y ago
> Does it even reduce latency that much Absolutely: https://wondernetwork.com/pings/ https://wondernetwork.com/pings/ Stockholm <-> Tokyo is at least 400ms here, anytime you have multi-national sites having a CDN is important. For your local city, not so much (and of course you won't even see it locally).
- bawolff 2y ago
  I understand that ping times are different when geolocated. My point was that in fairly typical scenarios (worst cases are going to be worse) it would be hidden by backend latency since the fetch could be concurrent with link headers or http 103. Devil in details of course.
a2800276 2y ago
I'm so glad to find some sane voices here! I mean, sure, if you're really serving a lot of traffic to Mombasa, akamai will reduce latency. You could also try to avoid multi megabyte downloads for a simple page.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Content: 50KB Images: 1MB Javascript: 35MB Fonts: 200KB Someone who is good at the internet please help me budget this. My bounce rate is dying.
  - jenadine 2y ago
    What's all that JavaScript for?
    - ozzcer 2y ago
      Cookie banner
  - bawolff 2y ago
    While there are lots of bad examples out there - keep in mind its not quite that straight forward as it can make a big difference whether those resources are on the critical path that blocks first paint or not.
- josephg 2y ago
  It’s not an either or thing. Do both. Good sites are small and download locally. The CDN will work better (and be cheaper to use!) if you slim down your assets as well.

akira2501 2y ago

> But not to increase cache hit rate (what CDNs were originally intended for) Was it really cache hit rate of the client or cache hit rate against the backend?

matsur 2y ago
Both.