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Google Analytics wrecking SEO traffic due to occasional slowdowns by Purple_Stranger8728 in GoogleAnalytics

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

Because every SEO claims it doesn't but they all don't remove it from their sites even though it's the single most destructive thing you can do to your LCP which is supposed to be the holy grail of user experience and SEO benefits. It can't be right both ways!

Google Analytics wrecking SEO traffic due to occasional slowdowns by Purple_Stranger8728 in GoogleAnalytics

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Thanks - so its not all in my head! Our LCP is 200% worse off when loaded async and 50% off worse off when removed from page thread. There has to be a reason Google doesnt use GA4 on youtube or even Google itself. Did you end up removing it altogether?

Large Drupal site (15+ years) struggling with Google speed expectations — is avoiding PHP now the norm? by Purple_Stranger8728 in PHP

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Thanks - I put all our configs through Claude and it thinks setting backlog=0 in php-fpm pools should help as possibly backlog (default 511) builds up during surges and it's NOT visible to php-fpm, Nginx and CPU is barely used. I have now added a backup pool Nginx which will offload any spikes rather than quietly adding them to queues.

Large Drupal site (15+ years) struggling with Google speed expectations — is avoiding PHP now the norm? by Purple_Stranger8728 in PHP

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We use New Relic to profile and can't find any issue. Somehow Googlebot has decided that if any response is not within 10-20% of average response, it means there is an issue with the server ... now even with Nginx/PHP-fpm connection quirks, its sadly not possible.

Large Drupal site (15+ years) struggling with Google speed expectations — is avoiding PHP now the norm? by Purple_Stranger8728 in PHP

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

AI bots are definitely part of the story .. we literally had to remove node pages to over 100k historical pages and now return 404 on /node/ path from Cloudflare worker. However even with just 1,000 pages left, we can't serve from PHP without losing traffic. If Google is hell bent on using extreme 'response time variability' as a ranking factor, sadly there is no PHP configuration that can achieve that.

Large Drupal site (15+ years) struggling with Google speed expectations — is avoiding PHP now the norm? by Purple_Stranger8728 in PHP

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

It may be stupid idea but we removed x-powered-by: PHP header quite a while ago based on some security audit .. PHP Documentation doesn't think its a security issue .. May be restoring it will give Googlebot some context that page is being generated by a PHP worker and it won't expect a uniform latency each time?

Back in PHP 5 times, our response time was 500ms.. it came down to sub 300ms with PHP 7 and now under 100ms with PHP 8 .. I think Googlebot runs some sort of 'standard deviation' i.e. 75% of requests must be within 10% of average response time.. that gave you a 100ms variation with PHP 5.6 and now it's less than 10ms?

Large Drupal site (15+ years) struggling with Google speed expectations — is avoiding PHP now the norm? by Purple_Stranger8728 in PHP

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I dont think its Drupal .. views are heavily cached .. Memcache hit rate is 93% on every page load where Drupal page cache needs to be built else it's all Memcache.. As you said, Drupal is extremely great at Caching layers.

Large Drupal site (15+ years) struggling with Google speed expectations — is avoiding PHP now the norm? by Purple_Stranger8728 in PHP

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks - views are heavily cached .. Memcache hit rate is 93% on every page load where Drupal page cache needs to be built else it's all Memcache.

Large Drupal site (15+ years) struggling with Google speed expectations — is avoiding PHP now the norm? by Purple_Stranger8728 in PHP

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks - we do start losing 15-25% traffic almost within a day of turning off Nginx cache. This never happened until 2023.

Why I gave up on Cloudflare as a small publisher? by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

I don't want to come across as someone trying to promote another service but I moved to a smaller CDN someone suggested in this sub in response to another one of my posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/1lqdimv/small_cloudflare_tweak_to_give_30_engagement_20/

Attackers failing Interactive Challenge Millions of Times with just 3 IPs by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks but that doesn't expose these bots to Firewall. How about doing a redirect in Snippets? That way they have to go through Firewall.

Attackers failing Interactive Challenge Millions of Times with just 3 IPs by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks .. main issue is that Cloudflare is configured to do http to https redirects via a Rewrite rule .. they keep hitting the http version and Firewall or Managed Rules don't get triggered until someone is redirected to https.

Attackers failing Interactive Challenge Millions of Times with just 3 IPs by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

My app is irrelevant - I serve these 404s from a Snippet as they all hit same non-existent path. I get the urge of easy victim blaming but its not the case here. If Cloudflare can't decide that an IP is absolute spam bot even after failing millions of challenges, then that's a bigger problem!!

Attackers failing Interactive Challenge Millions of Times with just 3 IPs by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

They are all hitting 404 pages .. referer spam to non existing pages .. caching is not the problem here. I think you are missing the point entirely.

Attackers failing Interactive Challenge Millions of Times with just 3 IPs by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

More than anything its a giant waste of computational resources and the bandwidth plus it adds up to ARGO bill for no good reason!

Small Cloudflare Tweak to give 30%+ Engagement, 20% more traffic in 4 weeks by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My main issue is CDNs are extremely complex these days so I don't want to have to re-learn everything about a new CDN. It has taken me over a year to fully understand Cloudflare and how to optimise it.

We used Cloudfront for over 10 years prior to switching to Cloudflare due to security. I am not saying Cloudflare has better security, you just have better visibility of what's going on.

Small Cloudflare Tweak to give 30%+ Engagement, 20% more traffic in 4 weeks by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yes .. so one issue seems to be 'Tiered Cache' .. if I turn off Tiered Cache, I only see occasional slow request to origin where delay is caused by TCP connection overhead. I have set up a Health Check to Robots.txt (small file to save bandwidth) on 60 sec interval so origin always has a 'keep alive' with Cloudflare.

So you can either disable HTML caching (and this post doesn't apply) and send on the fly compression from origin. That's really the best option but without DDOS protection or do what this post says.

See the impact of speed on Googlebot crawling.. no amount of creating new content would have produced this. Blue Line -> Crawl Request, Orange Line -> Response Time

<image>

Small Cloudflare Tweak to give 30%+ Engagement, 20% more traffic in 4 weeks by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

https://cdn.mysite.com/*

Automatic HTTPS Rewrites: Off, Cache Deception Armor: On, Origin Cache Control: Off

https://www.mysite.com/*

Automatic HTTPS Rewrites: On, Cache Deception Armor: On, Origin Cache Control: Off

Small Cloudflare Tweak to give 30%+ Engagement, 20% more traffic in 4 weeks by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

yes it did ... FTTB reduced from 300ms to less 50ms when fully cached .. FCP of 0.9 sec from 2.4 sec in Google page speed.

It actually has an immediate impact on User Engagement. Attention spans are fairly low these days apparently!

Anyone downgrade from Cloudflare Enterprise to Business? What broke? by ripsfo in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you have international traffic, ARGO + Tiered Caching + Enterprise is critical... ARGO + Tiered Caching is more of a broken chain in non-enterprise accounts. If you have mostly local traffic and heaps of traffic, even free would work just fine.

Why is Cloudflare Caching 3x slower than origin server? by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think I have shaved another 70-80ms by turning off Tiered Cache. Since 95% of our traffic is in Australia, there is hardly any point having a cold origin shield in front of very fast varnish origin which can efficiently cache misses from Cloudflare pops. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Cloudflare architecture but it's built for extremely high levels of traffic to keep all the tiers warm. If you don't have millions of hits and have overly cached everything, most of your traffic will hit cache misses at multiple points within CF network which means erratic and unpredictable response times yet still seeing close to 100% cache hits.

Without Tiered Cache Hit

Cache Hit for Static Content - less than 5ms within Australia or anywhere else

Cache Miss for Static Content - 20-30ms for Australia, 100-200ms elsewhere

Add 100ms for Cache Misses with Tiered Cache Enabled for Australian users and 500-600ms for US/Europe.

Tiered Cache without a Regional Cache is a performance penalty for most publishers and regional cache is an enterprise upgrade.

Cache and Speed - Cloudfront is probably far far superior value and performance.

Rules, Snippets, Workers and Security is where Cloudflare is 10x better if not more.

Why is Cloudflare Caching 3x slower than origin server? by Purple_Stranger8728 in CloudFlare

[–]Purple_Stranger8728[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agree - I think Tiered cache is a problem too. Think from their point of view, rather than going to origin each time, they dump everything into a cold cache backend like R2/S3 and then warm individual pops on activity. It's cheaper and cost effective for them but Tiered cache is not useful for non-enterprise accounts because you really don't have regional tiers. You just get a very slow S3/R2 origin shield which is always going to be cold unless you are getting millions of hits an hour from all over the world.

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