Inconsistent and slow response times from Cloudflare Images

[galambborong]

I am spiking Cloudflare Images at the moment and, on the whole, I am really pleased with it. However, I am noticing a lot of inconsistency in the response time from imagesdelivery.net and wondered:

• Is it just me, or are others experiencing this?
• How do I remedy this? It is most likely that I’m doing something wrong

Often it serves small-ish image files (8KB and 14KB files) in ~400ms, compared with larger files (fonts, for example) coming from the Edge via Cloudflare Pages which are downloaded in around 50ms.

I then occasionally get randomly slower requests - not necessarily for the larger image varients:

Again, similar here:

And, even slower:

As you can see, this image below is barely even 4KB and it’s taking 569ms to load:

I’ve looked through the forums and not found a solution, and I’ve not really found anyone writing here with similar issues. The closest I could find to a similar thread was this one (which I note was closed with no real solution/input).

I assumed Cloudflare Images would be the best choice especially given how impressive Cloudflare usually is, but I’m wondering about exploring other providers now (though I would prefer to be told I’m doing something wrong, see better performance, and stay with this service).

Just for clarity: None of my images are signed urls, and I’m aware that one can use custom domains, which I have not done.

Hoping someone here can guide me. Thanks in advance.

[galambborong]

Just a minor follow on from my initial post: I deployed a feature branch with image files just saved directly into the repo to my Cloudflare Pages. Same site, same images, same set of resolution variants.

The difference in speed is light and day:

Instead of tending towards 500-700ms, with frequent unexplained response times in the seconds; this pretty much consistently responds with the images in <100ms - even for the highest resolution files.

[user21821]

Yes, seeing the same thing, but very periodic and more extreme failure - sometimes they just time out and don’t show.

[eva2000]

Generating AVIF images is very resource intensive from my experience, so if it’s specifically related to AVIF images for first time generation, it could be slower. Try just serving webP and compare image sizes and response times to AVIF to see if AVIF is worth it for your usage case.