Speeding up the forums with CloudFlare cache control

Gubstep

So I took a quick look at the forums after the new server architecture and it's still slow. It takes about 1 second to load each page, regardless of whether it's changed or not. It looks like from your http header that the Ashes of Creation site uses CloudFlare as it's cdn.

The cache-control is set to to

private, no-cache, max-age=0, must-revalidate

no-cache is the same as max-age=0 must-revalidate, but this is causing the site to refresh/redownload a lot of elements on the forum that could be cached.

By adding cf-cache-status: HIT and changing cache-control to max-age=120 (or less or more), you could not only reduce load times, but reduce bandwidth. To confirm this, I looked at https://battlefront-forums.ea.com which also uses Vanilla Forums.

The initial response time was around 1100ms, which is about what the ashes forum does all the time. The cached response is around 600ms and transferred significantly less data overall.

Just figured I would bring this to the attention of your web team before Apoc where we'll have lots more people on the forums. Save a bit of bandwidth overall.

Changing

cache-control: private, no-cache, max-age=0, must-revalidate

to

cache-control: max-age=120
cache-tag: deviceType:desktop,resourceType:dynamic,responseStatus:200
cf-cache-status: HIT

LieutenantToast

Hi there - the server architecture updates listed in our recent maintenance would not have impacted our forums, as those are hosted and powered by Vanilla. The maintenance impacted only our own account and platform services!

I've shared your suggestion with our team (and folks who know way more about this than I do ) to see if this is something we can take further action on - I appreciate you reaching out to share this info!

I'm going to go ahead and close this thread out now, but please feel free to DM me directly if you have any additional details you'd like to share!