Latency to Cloudflare – Why it’s important

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) offer a number of benefits for websites and Internet services, with the main one being the improvement of overall load times for the user.

Cloudflare offer a wide range of services and they explain the importance of using a CDN with regards to load times on their web site: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/cdn/performance/.

Putting it very simply, moving assets closer to the user means overall page load times decrease. And this is the main role of a CDN.

But, it’s important to bear in mind uncacheable objects – objects such as dynamic web pages that change with every request – that also need to be served. These requests also form an important part of the user experience. If such a request is routed through Cloudflare, Cloudflare themselves make a request to your web infrastructure, fetches the content, and serves it to the user. And it’ll do this for every request.

It’s therefore important to ensure latency between your web infrastructure and Cloudflare, and the general internet, is low.

And this is where the graph comes in! This is a new private cloud we’re currently deploying, hosted for our client within one of our Central London data centre racks. We’re using the deeserve monitoring platform to monitor the latency between the infrastructure and Cloudflare, and, as you can see, ping is averaging just 1ms (0.001 seconds), presumably to their London POP, and often dropping below that – pretty impressive!

When website load times are such a major factor in a user’s experience, this sort of attention to detail can really help – “half a second” doesn’t sound like much, but 500ms is MASSIVE in terms of latency. For primarily UK-based traffic, London-based data centres are often difficult to beat.

Posted on: 23rd June 2021.