Slow Response Times Compared to other Cloudflare Users

[tyler3]

Hi everyone,

Today I spent some time doing some performance testing on my embeddable JS widget. It’s a single JS file that my company serves through Cloudflare. When I compare our response times to a competitor, who is also using Cloudflare, the numbers don’t quite add up for me. Hoping someone can help.

My file size is 30KB, and have cache and argo enabled. Also, confirmed the Cloudflare cache is being HIT.

A competitors file size is 60KB, but are getting significantly faster response times despite both of us using Cloudflare and their file being twice the size.

In the chart, the grey is my file, the colored is the competitors file.

I would assume that since my file is smaller, it should have a quicker response (faster download), but this isn’t the case.

Are there any settings I should look at to try to improve this, or any other factors that may be causing this difference? I am happy to provide more info if necessary!

[sdayman]

I can only speculate with the limited data shown, but I wonder why four of those locations are faster for you. I do have some questions:

1. Do you have headers for every one of those tests? Those would show if it’s a HIT or MISS, and which datacenter they’re hitting.
2. Are you on the free plan? How about the competitor?
3. Can you color-code your responses as well? With the competitor, the color segments aren’t proportional from location to location.

[tyler3]

Hi @sdayman, thanks for the reply!

1. Unfortunately no. The free tool I am using doesn’t include that information. I could however look for some that do though.

2. Yes, I am on the free plan and not sure what the competitor is on. Would Pro, or Biz, benefit us here? I did just read something about prioritization.

3. Yep, the first image is my response times. And the second is the competitor.

Competitors:

Thanks so much!

[tyler3]

Friendly Bump

[eva2000]

Don’t just use one testing tool to evaluate your site. I recommend you use webpagetest.org as they have enough geographical test server locations and browser/mobile clients and speed profiles to more accurate test and compare sites. I wrote a guide on using webpagetest.org for comparing sites too so you can see their respective waterfalls and film strips for perceived visual render page load times https://community.centminmod.com/threads/how-to-use-webpagetest-org-for-page-load-speed-testing.13859/

Your above charts don’t show the breakdown of the connection profile for your greyed bars so harder to see where your page load times are falling behind i.e. dns, tls handshake times etc. But your 2nd separate charts sort of do - webpagetest.org will allow you more accurate comparisons though.