Can someone from CF please post an official recommendation as to whether or not APO and Rocket Loader should be used together? I can’t find any information on this.
Does APO handle the automagical deferral of JS loading in the same way that Rocket Loader does? Is there any benefit in using the two of them together? Is there any risk of issues by using them together?
Thanks in advance for your thorough reply.
They’re two different functions. APO is only for caching HTML.
*ok, it also lets you cache Google Fonts.
@sdayman I’m not sure that’s the case actually. My understanding is that APO caches all static files, and also html. I have it enabled on a high traffic site and I’m seeing our jpgs, pngs, js, css, etc. being cached.
The difference between the two services offered by CF is that Rocket Loader prioritizes all non-JS files in the browser loading order to reduce any blocking time.
The question I asked above still stands: does APO offer the same “re-ordering” functionality that Rocket Loader does.
Should I use the two together, or is Rocket Loader redundant if I’ve already got APO enabled?
Cloudflare already caches static files by default. APO just adds extra caching for HTML (with a cookie bypass) and routes Google Fonts through your domain so they can be cached as well.
No. Nor would you want it to. Rocket Loader sometimes breaks sites, and if APO did that, there’d be no way to disable it without losing APO caching.
@sdayman Okay, thanks for the info. Very helpful.
So the answer is: Yes, it’s recommended to use both APO and Rocket Loader?
I can’t speak for Cloudflare, but it’ll most likely work. Personally, I don’t use Rocket Loader because my JS is already optimized, and I don’t need Rocket Loader to combine JS thanks to HTTP/2’s efficiency.
I use wp rocket with custom Nginx try files to bypass php.
Actually faster than Nginx fast cgi by a couple requests with pressure testing and in tmpfs which means cache is stored in ram along with argo paid my international traffic is pretty darn fast.
Turned off apo and used above, more messing around but it’s lighting, apo had far far too many issues from not purging properly amongst lots of little things, plus it can take 12 months for a single cache bug to be addressed hello GitHub mobile thread.
Hopefully the survey gets some love going, it’s great idea and has the potential to be awesome if the kinks can be turned out.
Also rocket loader and apo can be used together, just make sure it doesn’t break your js scripts, rocket loader is great but can do funky things sometimes.