Why does Cloudflare IPFS gateway load so slowly?

Website, Application, Performance
1

My website https://3cities.xyz is hosted on the Cloudflare IPFS gateway per the instructions at Overview · Cloudflare Web3 docs.

The site loads EXTREMELY slowly. Why does it load so slowly?

The site’s IPFS content is seeded on two different IPFS seeding platforms. Please do not say this is simply a seeding issue. The function of a mature IPFS gateway like Cloudflare’s is to pick up seeded content and cache it for quick serving. Why is the Cloudflare IPFS gateway so slow?

I ported my whole domain to Cloudflare just to use the IPFS gateway. Can anybody recommend an IPFS gateway that isn’t terrible?

At this point, my site is so slow to load on the CF IPFS gateway for most users globally that it’s a total embarrassment and nuclear scenario for our brand and product.

2

Good question

It seems inconsistent to me, varying between fast & slow

Just curl’ing the front page, I’ve seen response times anywhere from 20 seconds to half a second.

the very slow loads show “cf-cache-status: REVALIDATED” while the fast loads show “cf-cache-status: HIT”

so it seems like the slow loads happens when Cloudflare needs to re-cache the site

hopefully someone will have some further insight

out of curiosity, what was the motivation to host in IPFS? I’ve been thinking about giving it a try but mostly just out of curiosity

3

I had to wait about 15s for the JS files, which was very slow, but also very large (/static/js/main.b8df2ddb.js, 275kB) but after it was served once it was cached and the second request was exceptionally fast.
This probably is shining some light on the difference between Cloudflare performance and the performance of the current IPFS implementation - specially for big files.

1 Like
4

Long-term CF IPFS user here. The performance these days is very bad, started roughly when the transition from the legacy gateway to the new web3 gateway happened.

Previously once it was in CF cache, sites were very fast and stayed fast. Nowadays CF edge seems to invalidate the cache within 10 minutes and it has to retrieve again. Even with aggressive “cache everything” page rules, the cache just won’t stick.

Been also wondering what’s going on here. Kind of expected service to improve now that web3 is an official thing within Cloudflare, but my experience has been the opposite

5

Thanks for your thoughts everybody. I have been able to escalate this to Cloudflare eng and will report back.

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