For a very small instance with only a couple of concurrent users a CDN might not make much difference. But if you take a look at your web server logs you’ll quickly notice that every post / like / vote triggers a storm of requests from other instances to yours, looking up lots of different […]

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/5391072

February 20, 2024 piefedadmin writes:

For a very small instance with only a couple of concurrent users a CDN might not make much difference. But if you take a look at your web server logs you’ll quickly notice that every post / like / vote triggers a storm of requests from other instances to yours, looking up lots of different things. It’s easy to imagine how quickly this would overwhelm an instance once it gets even a little busy.

One of the first web performance tools people reach for is to use a CDN, like Cloudflare. But how much difference will it make? In this video I show you my web server logs before and after and compare them.

Read How much difference does a CDN make to a fediverse instance?

    • freamon@endlesstalk.orgEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Flippin’ eck. Seeing a familiar Lemmy post on there, clicking it and seeing the whole thing render instantly was a bit of a shock after getting used to Lemmy’s more pedestrian loading of stuff.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        Using a CDN does not come without downsides, though. Cloudflare itself is becoming another “too big to fail” entity of a system that is not supposed to depend on the resilience/capacity/budget of any single actor.

        Personally, I’d rather see a tiered architecture for data, where servers are only responsible for guaranteeing the data from actors on their own servers, but everything else stored in a distributed, append-only stream of data. This would make a lot cheaper to run individual instances and would allow clients to obtain the data from multiple sources.