We've had a full day operating with the CloudFlare CDN for gnuradio.org. This hasn't been long enough for the new DNS IP addresses to propagate everywhere but we're seeing most of our non-spider traffic coming through the CDN now.
The statistics from CloudFlare show that, for non web-crawler traffic, in the last 24-hours:
59,300 page visits 1881 unique IP addresses 6 GB of bandwidth used
The web crawler traffic from Google, Baidu, and others adds about 50% more hits on top of that from another 149 unique IP addresses.
So far, from what we've gathered from our server monitoring, the CPU usage has gone from a consistent 80% - 100% down to 30% - 70%, and the bandwidth we're being charged for has decreased over 40%. You can judge for yourself the positive impact this has had on the web server response time.
That part of the experiment has gone well.
We've had to change the URL for access to the gnuradio.org Git repository when accessing it over the native Git protocol, as gnuradio.org now resolves to one of the CloudFlare CDN servers. We've added a DNS entry to create 'git.gnuradio.org', which will always point directly to the server. Thus, the URL is:
Not only will this continue to work, but CloudFlare is caching the data, so our web server never sees most of this traffic, and the overall repository checkout time should be going down.
We'll look at the statistics again after a week to see how things go. If all is well we may even move to more aggressive caching from CloudFlare (we're on the 'medium' setting.)
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Johnathan Corgan Corgan Labs - SDR Training and Development Services http://corganlabs.com