Cloudflare APO & SG Optimizer

  • Resolved gbruzzo

    (@gbruzzo)


    3 years, 5 months ago

    Hello there,
    hope you are all well!

    touching base with a few short questions.

    Premise: we have been using SG-Optimizer on a Siteground VPS for several months now (having switched over from an internal cache solution). This brought several advantages, it was a great first step.

    A second, great improvement, occurred when we started using the Cloudflare integration a month or so ago, switching off all Optimizer Frontpage optimisations (with HTTP2 we didn’t see any advantage from bundling assets together, only keeping Dynamic Cache / Memcache enabled and letting Cloudflare minify/zip/railgun and rocket load the assets). Load times of cached assets went down even further.

    Third phase: the only question remaining is the mirroring of cached pages and assets across Cloudflare’s network. This is where APO comes in (I think). It is my understanding , that Cloudflare’s APO optimisation uses their KV workers to mirror assets (and maybe whole pages? not sure) to all edge servers – so a user requesting a fresh page in the UK will result in this page (?) being cached also for a Japanese and a Brasilian user. If this is the case, then the benefits would be absolutely incredible – ‘localised’ caching would become global.

    My question is therefore: is the current integration of SG Optimizer and Cloudflare also enabling the same kind of ‘mirroring’ as APO?

    If not, might this be integrated in future? Are there any plans?
    Would it be possible to use the APO plugin instead of SG Optimizer (I understand it is not free, but costs 5 dollars per month, on top of it).

    Please advise, as this is a topic of very great interest.

    Thank you in advance
    Giacomo Bruzzo

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Hristo Pandjarov

    (@hristo-sg)

    SiteGround Representative

    Cloudflare APO is nothing but a set of optimizations for your WordPress site that SG Optimizer does anyway. Whether you make them on plugin or CDN level it doesn’t really matter, the end effect is the same. If you use SGO there is no need to pay for the APO.

    Thread Starter gbruzzo

    (@gbruzzo)

    Dear @hristo-sg

    thank you very much for taking the time to respond.

    I think I broadly understand your point, though my question was related to the type of CF worker SG optimizer parametrises/uses.

    If I understand correctly, you register only one worker called sg_worker.

    If I also understand correctly, cloudflare APO uses KV workers instead (or on top of regular workers? not sure to be honest). As stated on their launch blog post (https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-automatic-platform-optimization-for-wordpress-using-cloudflare-workers/) “it only requires a single request to the page to cache it and within a minute it is made available to be read back from KV from any Cloudflare data center.

    This would certainly be very beneficial to sites with few delocalised (but very valuable) customers.

    It is clear that accessing CF via SG Optimizer is spectacularly easy (single click no DNS configuration – absolutely amazing); I also do not think SG Optimizer and APO should be used together, there is too much overlap ‘under the hood’.

    My question is though: Have Siteground / the Caching Team considered implementing the scheme offered by APO in SG Optimizer, using KV workers to push assets to peripheral stores automatically, and therefore reducing page load times on the periphery?

    Thank you in advance for your responses ,

    Giacomo Bruzzo

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by gbruzzo.
    Thread Starter gbruzzo

    (@gbruzzo)

    Hello there,

    hope you are all well.

    Maybe this is not the place to ask broad development questions not immediately related to a support issue. I certainly do not wish to abuse your time.

    If that is the case, could you please suggest a place I may submit my question above?
    Siteground Support is now very automated and pre-filtered, and I am uncertain where to ask questions as the one above (there are no forums that I know of, for example).

    I certainly would appreciate receiving an answer to my question above (or similar ones in future). (I am a VPS customer, btw.)

    Thanks in advance for any clarification.

    Kind regards

    Giacomo Bruzo

    Plugin Author Hristo Pandjarov

    (@hristo-sg)

    SiteGround Representative

    APO is a paid service and the functionality we need to make this work much better is part of their paid plan too. Really we can’t do much to optimize without Cloudflare upselling you to their business plan ??

    However, soon, we will have another free solution that will work in a much more efficient way so stay tuned and check our plugin and our SG blog for news ??

    Thread Starter gbruzzo

    (@gbruzzo)

    Dear @hristo-sg

    thank you for taking the time to address my query.
    You have clarified my queries, directly and implicitly, all understood, thank you.

    I am really looking forward to hear about new tech coming from Siteground. What I have experienced until now has been unquestionably excellent and beneficial.

    Cheers

    Giacomo Bruzzo

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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