For a very small instance with only a couple of concurrent users a CDN might not make much difference. But if you take a look at your web server logs you’ll quickly notice that every post / like / vote triggers a storm of requests from other instances to yours, looking up lots of different […]

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/5391072

February 20, 2024 piefedadmin writes:

For a very small instance with only a couple of concurrent users a CDN might not make much difference. But if you take a look at your web server logs you’ll quickly notice that every post / like / vote triggers a storm of requests from other instances to yours, looking up lots of different things. It’s easy to imagine how quickly this would overwhelm an instance once it gets even a little busy.

One of the first web performance tools people reach for is to use a CDN, like Cloudflare. But how much difference will it make? In this video I show you my web server logs before and after and compare them.

Read How much difference does a CDN make to a fediverse instance?

  • @tristan@aussie.zoneEnglish
    16•4 months ago

    For a bit of context for those not too familiar with CDN stuff. My web server hosts about 20 small business websites. None are heavy on images or video or anything else. Most sites have well under 1k visitors a day, some are under 100.

    Each month CloudFlare CDN saves me between 40-60gb of traffic which is nothing my server couldn’t handle, but over a year is ~600gb in saved data so it adds up

    If you had a Lemmy instance with even just 100 active users, with all the images and videos and all the federated background communications, that would add up extremely quickly.