Hi, we enabled Cloudflare for our DNSs - we previously used Route53 (AWS) - and our servers are in AWS.
We were expecting to improve our times, but the server processing has increased with the change, DNS and TLS times have improved though. Is this the expected behaviour? Why we are not seeing these times for Server Processing when we not use Cloudflare?
Not using Cloudflare:
DNS Lookup: 271ms
TCP Connection: 89ms
TLS Handshake: 201ms
Server Processing: 103ms
Content Transfer: 1ms
Using Cloudflare:
DNS Lookup: 5ms
TCP Connection: 19ms
TLS Handshake: 30ms
Server Processing: 465ms
Content Transfer: 1ms
Cache is not enabled since this is a dynamic response.
When using Cloudflare the “Server Processing” time includes:
This is because Cloudflare has to connect to your server and fetch the resource as well. Subsequent requests using the same connection should have a much lower “Server Processing” time.
Thanks for your answer Albert
The thing is that subsequent requests do not improve those times, only one out of many and very random. Maybe because we have very low traffic? or should I check anything else on our LB side?
Do you know what would be a reasonable average time for the response?
If you use a tool like cURL, each request opens a new connection. Therefore the performance does not match what a user would experience when visiting the site with a browser.
In general, you should not expect Cloudflare to improve the TTFB of uncached requests except when using Argo Smart Routing. The real performance gains come from good caching.