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Vanilla & CloudFlare?
MasterOne
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Our forum is accessed globally with currently about 400-500 unique visitors in 24 hours and >3000 page hits a day. The site is hosted in a large data center in Germany, showing real good performance from my place here, but others on the other side of the globe report not so great access/loading times.
- Is anyone here using Vanilla with CloudFlare?
- What's the experience?
- How's the setup?
- What does the CloudFlareSupport plugin (v1.2.1) exactly do?
- Is the plugin working properly with v2.1.1?
I was looking at the CloudFlare Pro plan (because our site is SSL only) if it gives a major advantage and my other forum partners agree.
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Cloudflare can help with loading of css and static stuff. You need to see exactly what files are "farmed out by cloudlfare". Personally I hate it for development, only because it if you are changing theme css, etc. It makes it harder since everything comes from cloudlflare so the usual clearing of cache on your site doesn't work and it takes a while for changes to percolate through to you to "disable cloudflare" for those changes, provided you have permission.
It's not going to improve and php file or sql performance.
Some people like it.
You don't need the cloudflare plugin if your host has an option for cloudflare support.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
As far as I know, CDNs store static files. That will be a few CSS, JS, JPG, PNG and maybe some custom fonts. Your htaccess should contain some expire entries, so that the above mentioned files will be stored locally. This way, a CDN will only be useful for the first access to most of the resources. I cannot imagine, that using one will speed up the access very much, but that is just a wild guess, since I do not have real experiences with CDNs.
There are a lot of pictures in our forum, but they are all optimized for file size (800x600px with 80% JPEG quality), so I guess the advantage would be too small to justify their monthly fee.
I was just curious because so many sizes use the CloudFlare service nowadays (which I can see getting blocked by NoScript).
With cloudflare you point you domain directly to CloudFlare, so it is bit more than a traditional static content cdn.
grep is your friend.
@MasterOne: We are also hosting in germany all-inkl.com on a managed server. One of my boards has 5.500 Unqiues a day with about 25.000 pageviews a day. I optimized a lot in page speed and we use memcached on that forum. Optimizing the database here and there also helps. I accessed my forum from japan to mallorca and the perfomance didn't feel slower. You sure it has something to do with it.
Could you drop me a link so i can see your board? (PM maybe) Would be interested why it's slower.
Checked your board and I dropped you a Page Speed link as PM.
There is a lot you can do to optimize speed for your forum.
Thanks, @phreak, I haven't seen Google's PageSpeed Insights page before. I'll have a look.
Cool + you can get more insights with: http://gtmetrix.com/
That is a very good site.
Cloudflare is worth the basic plan for your situation. It's perfectly suited for what you need it for. I've used it many times in this same situation.
I use CloudFlare with our forum. We use the free plan, and it certainly improves page load speed.
That said, I suspect if I took the time to learn all the tips and tricks, I could get the same results for myself.