4 ms·

Does HN really have that many lurkers that it can can cause a hug-of-death on a website behind cloudflare like this??

pxeboot 1y ago
The Cloudflare Workers free tier is not unlimited. They offer two options on how to handle the situation [1]. [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#daily-request https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#d...
throwaway519 1y ago
Wasn't Cloudflare supposed to prevent DDOSing? It seems only a privacy leak tool now. 1000 requests / min @ 10ms limit / request. That's 16 requests per second. Any reasonable CMS, wiki or blogging tool should be able to do one request in 62.5ms. Add on cacheing for non logged in users and nginx serving anything static, that's less than the power a $5 VPS provides. At these rates, the case for Cloudflare is a lot less than it was.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  "Wasn't Cloudflare supposed to prevent DDOSing?" there a fine line between DDOS from bots and 30k real users accessing your site at the same time cloudflare do not provide resource for the latter
  - singularity2001 1y ago
    don't they offer caching?
  - 93po 1y ago
    isnt the point of a DDOS being unable to differentiate the traffic and therefore not block it? ideally it would look like organic 30k
    - genewitch 1y ago
      Yes, I have had to block all of Asia before on forums, at verisign. It was more than 30k IPs.
- mklepaczewski 1y ago
  62.5ms for a non-cached request? In my experience that’s really fast response time for a blog even on a dedicated bare-metal server.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - josephg 1y ago
    Really? Why? Blog posts don’t change much. Even if your rendering code is horrendously slow (though, why?), you can just cache the resulting html and serve it up with each request. Or slap nginx in front of your web server locally and let that deal with the load. ‘Course you’ll need your http headers set correctly, but you needed that anyway for cloudflare. Your server has to be pretty badly configured for a personal blog to run out of CPU handling requests.
    - ffsm8 1y ago
      mklepaczewski was probably talking about end-to-end. I.e. the number you see in the network tab for request duration - whereas the pricing will only care about the time that the application is actually doing something. That basically means it starts after the connection was established by the proxy (cloudflare) and terminates before the response is delivered to the client. Doing the whole round trip within 65ms is actually pretty challenging, even if you are requesting over the wire. It would mean you have maybe 10-20 Ms to query data from the database and process them to html or json. Any kind of delay while querying the database is going to ruin that. If you had a 65ms in the application, you would probably get a round trip average of something above 90, likely closer to 150 then 90.
      - josephg 1y ago
        For a blog? Why is a blog fetching data from a database on every request? If you cache the response yourself (or use nginx), the server should be responding to queries in <1ms.
- ezfe 1y ago
  This isn’t a performance hug of death, it’s a rate limit one.
- reassess_blind 1y ago
  Yes, and it does that well. This user has exceeded the 100,000 free workers invocations per day, a different service.
- elric 1y ago
  A privacy leak tool, and an annoyance generator. Every time I have to click their silly "prove you're human"-thing I feel a little more dehumanized.
  - imiric 1y ago
    Are you sure you're not a robot?[1] [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/im-not-a-robot https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/im-not-a-robot
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    Me too! https://medium.com/the-haven/i-am-worried-about-these-newest-captchas-82d406715994 https://medium.com/the-haven/i-am-worried-about-these-newest...
- throawayonthe 1y ago
  [dead]
- kentonv 1y ago
  Obviously a $5 VPS would give you more raw compute than the Cloudflare Workers free tier. However: 1. It would run in a single location in the world, whereas Workers (even on the free tier) will run in Cloudflare locations all around the world, close to the end user, reducing latency. 2. If you're going to compare against a $5 VPS, the $5 Workers paid tier is probably a better comparison? It can instantly scale to millions of requests per second. (Disclosure: I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)
  - throwaway519 1y ago
    10 million requests per month for $5 is about 4 requests per second, correct? Which is about 3 orders of magnitude less than nginx serving static html. As a comparison, that's akin to a person walking 4 km/day vs. flying 4,000 km/day, It's still not a great comparison as the $5 VPS is already paid for. But to take it as you suggest, I agree it's up to the website owner whether they prefer to have 4km/day workers who can sometimes clone themselves in different parts of the world but only for a limited time until they costmore, or a 4000/day flying suit. Still a bit apples to oranges.
mklepaczewski 1y ago
User would have to enable caching in CF and the response from the server would have to be cacheable for CF for caching to kick in.
franga2000 1y ago
Looks like it's not "behind cloudflare", but served using Cloudflare Workers. Probably on the free tier, which is capped at 100000 req/day.
ksec 1y ago
This is an Cloudflare Worker issue right now. Although I have no idea what the site is and why does it not work. Most site, on simple page like CMS or wiki should be static. And serving it from cache even a $5 VPS could do a few hundred page view per second, or 1000+ Request per second. I dont believe HN generate these amount of traffic. From previous note on other HN front page page it is actually much smaller than most expected. Something like IIRC 30K to 50K Page views - over the course of 24 hours.
- lionkor 1y ago
  A $5 vps can handle around 15k req/s with a normal setup (you then hit the limit of what a webserver can serve, maybe up to 35k but then it's really over). Mind you, at that point you serve more requests slower, before that you don't even notice a latency increase.
  - ksec 1y ago
    Yeah I was thinking of being limited by the pipe of 100mbps rather than CPU. But I just checked on Linode and DO turns out those low cost VPS no longer has this limitations. I guess I need to update my mental model. Just shows again we really don't need CDN for most things. Just keep it simple.
- efilife 1y ago
  $5 doesn't mean to everyone what it means to you. Not everyone lives in America
  - genewitch 1y ago
    Functionally a raspberry pi 2, that's what I consider $5/month tier. AWS had the t1.micro, but they also have the tiny lightsail VMs, ~1vcpu, 512mb RAM, slow disk, 100-1000mbit nic.
systemswizard 1y ago
It’s because it’s a poorly made Cloudflare worker site that prob ate up their free tier credits quickly

The Cloudflare Workers free tier is not unlimited. They offer two options on how to handle the situation [1]. [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#daily-request https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#d...

throwaway519 1y ago

Wasn't Cloudflare supposed to prevent DDOSing? It seems only a privacy leak tool now. 1000 requests / min @ 10ms limit / request. That's 16 requests per second. Any reasonable CMS, wiki or blogging tool should be able to do one request in 62.5ms. Add on cacheing for non logged in users and nginx serving anything static, that's less than the power a $5 VPS provides. At these rates, the case for Cloudflare is a lot less than it was.

tonyhart7 1y ago
"Wasn't Cloudflare supposed to prevent DDOSing?" there a fine line between DDOS from bots and 30k real users accessing your site at the same time cloudflare do not provide resource for the latter
- singularity2001 1y ago
  don't they offer caching?
- 93po 1y ago
  isnt the point of a DDOS being unable to differentiate the traffic and therefore not block it? ideally it would look like organic 30k
  - genewitch 1y ago
    Yes, I have had to block all of Asia before on forums, at verisign. It was more than 30k IPs.
mklepaczewski 1y ago
62.5ms for a non-cached request? In my experience that’s really fast response time for a blog even on a dedicated bare-metal server.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- josephg 1y ago
  Really? Why? Blog posts don’t change much. Even if your rendering code is horrendously slow (though, why?), you can just cache the resulting html and serve it up with each request. Or slap nginx in front of your web server locally and let that deal with the load. ‘Course you’ll need your http headers set correctly, but you needed that anyway for cloudflare. Your server has to be pretty badly configured for a personal blog to run out of CPU handling requests.
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    mklepaczewski was probably talking about end-to-end. I.e. the number you see in the network tab for request duration - whereas the pricing will only care about the time that the application is actually doing something. That basically means it starts after the connection was established by the proxy (cloudflare) and terminates before the response is delivered to the client. Doing the whole round trip within 65ms is actually pretty challenging, even if you are requesting over the wire. It would mean you have maybe 10-20 Ms to query data from the database and process them to html or json. Any kind of delay while querying the database is going to ruin that. If you had a 65ms in the application, you would probably get a round trip average of something above 90, likely closer to 150 then 90.
    - josephg 1y ago
      For a blog? Why is a blog fetching data from a database on every request? If you cache the response yourself (or use nginx), the server should be responding to queries in <1ms.
ezfe 1y ago
This isn’t a performance hug of death, it’s a rate limit one.
reassess_blind 1y ago
Yes, and it does that well. This user has exceeded the 100,000 free workers invocations per day, a different service.
elric 1y ago
A privacy leak tool, and an annoyance generator. Every time I have to click their silly "prove you're human"-thing I feel a little more dehumanized.
- imiric 1y ago
  Are you sure you're not a robot?[1] [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/im-not-a-robot https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/im-not-a-robot
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  Me too! https://medium.com/the-haven/i-am-worried-about-these-newest-captchas-82d406715994 https://medium.com/the-haven/i-am-worried-about-these-newest...
throawayonthe 1y ago
[dead]
kentonv 1y ago
Obviously a $5 VPS would give you more raw compute than the Cloudflare Workers free tier. However: 1. It would run in a single location in the world, whereas Workers (even on the free tier) will run in Cloudflare locations all around the world, close to the end user, reducing latency. 2. If you're going to compare against a $5 VPS, the $5 Workers paid tier is probably a better comparison? It can instantly scale to millions of requests per second. (Disclosure: I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)
- throwaway519 1y ago
  10 million requests per month for $5 is about 4 requests per second, correct? Which is about 3 orders of magnitude less than nginx serving static html. As a comparison, that's akin to a person walking 4 km/day vs. flying 4,000 km/day, It's still not a great comparison as the $5 VPS is already paid for. But to take it as you suggest, I agree it's up to the website owner whether they prefer to have 4km/day workers who can sometimes clone themselves in different parts of the world but only for a limited time until they costmore, or a 4000/day flying suit. Still a bit apples to oranges.

mklepaczewski 1y ago

User would have to enable caching in CF and the response from the server would have to be cacheable for CF for caching to kick in.

franga2000 1y ago

Looks like it's not "behind cloudflare", but served using Cloudflare Workers. Probably on the free tier, which is capped at 100000 req/day.

ksec 1y ago

This is an Cloudflare Worker issue right now. Although I have no idea what the site is and why does it not work. Most site, on simple page like CMS or wiki should be static. And serving it from cache even a $5 VPS could do a few hundred page view per second, or 1000+ Request per second. I dont believe HN generate these amount of traffic. From previous note on other HN front page page it is actually much smaller than most expected. Something like IIRC 30K to 50K Page views - over the course of 24 hours.

lionkor 1y ago
A $5 vps can handle around 15k req/s with a normal setup (you then hit the limit of what a webserver can serve, maybe up to 35k but then it's really over). Mind you, at that point you serve more requests slower, before that you don't even notice a latency increase.
- ksec 1y ago
  Yeah I was thinking of being limited by the pipe of 100mbps rather than CPU. But I just checked on Linode and DO turns out those low cost VPS no longer has this limitations. I guess I need to update my mental model. Just shows again we really don't need CDN for most things. Just keep it simple.
efilife 1y ago
$5 doesn't mean to everyone what it means to you. Not everyone lives in America
- genewitch 1y ago
  Functionally a raspberry pi 2, that's what I consider $5/month tier. AWS had the t1.micro, but they also have the tiny lightsail VMs, ~1vcpu, 512mb RAM, slow disk, 100-1000mbit nic.

systemswizard 1y ago

It’s because it’s a poorly made Cloudflare worker site that prob ate up their free tier credits quickly