Does Cloudflare push cached pages to its other data centres?

Developers
1

When a page is cached in one data centre does it get pushed to all the other data centres?

For example.

  1. Request a page from London.
  2. Page is not in Cloudflare cache so Cloudflare fetches from origin.
  3. Response is returned from origin. Cloudflare caches in London data centre (and pushed to other data centres?) and returns response to client.
  4. Next request from London will get the page from the Cloudflare cache.

What if the next request was from Sydney? Would the page have been pushed to the Sydney Cloudflare data centre or would the Sydney data centre need to refetch from origin?

Thanks,

Neil

2

The steps are correct, but nothing is pushed to any other data center. Each first request to any data center will go to the origin and usually not go anymore until the cache expiration. This can change due to eviction for unused resources.

You can in some way do something like you are asking enabling Argo, which will use some Tier 1 POPs as middle caches between the origin and the final POPs. They won’t be pushed, there will still be some requests to the origin from all the Tier 1 POPs, but it should greatly increase cache hit ratios and reduce the requests to the origin.

1 Like
3

Thanks. I’ve been playing around with https://www.webpagetest.org and looking for the cf-cache-status header. It does seem that each data centre operates independently and will refetch from origin.

4

If you need to push to the CDN Cloudflare is not your best option. Usually the load is not that much unless the resources expire quickly