alt.hn

12/28/2025 at 12:42:11 PM

A super fast website using Cloudflare workers

 https://crazyfast.website

by kilroy123

12/31/2025 at 2:58:06 PM

The site is indeed instant, those performance tricks does work (inline everything, botli compression, cache, edge network like cdn), BUT the site is also completely empty, it shows nothing except a placeholder.

Things can easily change when you start adding functionalities. One site I like to visit to remind myself of how fast usable websites can be, is Dlangs forum. I just navigate around to get the experience.

https://forum.dlang.org

by Alifatisk

12/31/2025 at 3:06:12 PM

> One site I like to visit to remind myself of how fast usable websites can be, is Dlangs forum. I just navigate around to get the experience

Interestingly, for me each page load takes a noticeably long delay. Once it starts loading all of the content snaps in almost at once. It’s slower to get there than the other forums I visit though.

by Aurornis

12/31/2025 at 5:12:05 PM

I made a fast usable product page recently https://www.buyadagger.com/

by TehShrike

12/31/2025 at 11:13:38 PM

It's crazy how unusable most gun websites are for browsing what's available. This though is the perfect example of what I really want when browsing catalogues.

by ai_

12/31/2025 at 8:57:43 PM

Doesn't work without Javascript?

by HelloUsername

1/1/2026 at 7:46:56 PM

Correct, all the filtering is done locally in the browser, and the deploy is purely static.

If PSA had let me use affiliate links, I was planning to do the work to SSR in a Cloudflare Worker, but they declined and I decided to call the project where it was.

by TehShrike

12/31/2025 at 5:12:14 PM

Some sites can be very simple and yet quite useful. For example https://rawdiary.com/ always impresses me with its speed.

by benhurmarcel

12/31/2025 at 1:56:35 PM

One time I decided to check how much faster really you can go while still getting decent usability out of "simple blog platform" type of webapp.

End result, written in go, did around 80-200us to generate post page and 150-200us (on cheap linode VPS... probably far faster on my dev machine) for index page with a bunch of posts.

Core was basically

* pre-compile the templates

* load blogpost into RAM, pre-compile and cache the markdown part

cache could be easily kicked off to redis or similar but it's just text, there is no need

Fun stuff I hit around:

* runtime template loading takes a lot just for the type-casting; the template framework I used was basically thin veneer over Go code that got compiled to Go code when ran

* it was fast enough that multiple Write() vs one was noticeable on flame graph

* smart caching will get you everywhere if you get cache invalidation right, making the "slow" parts not matter; unless you're running years of content and gigabytes of text you probably don't want to cache it anywhere else than in RAM or at the very least have over-memory cache be second tier.

The project itself was rewrite of same thing that I tried in Perl(using Mojolicious) and even there it achieved single digit ms.

And it feels so... weird, using webpage that just reacts with speed that the well-written native app has. Whole design process was going against the ye olde "don't optimize prematurely" and it was complete success, looking at performance in each iteration of component paid off really quickly. We got robbed of so much time from badly running websites.

by PunchyHamster

12/31/2025 at 5:54:40 PM

I had my page served with Go and it was instant, 100% speed score. Then I moved the static content to a CDN and it's slower now, only 96% speed. However, the question is really how fast the page is when it comes under heavy load.

by jonathanstrange

12/31/2025 at 2:01:34 PM

> First visit: ~30ms. Real JavaScript executes at the edge.

It appears to have static content. Why does it need any JS at all?

by cuu508

12/31/2025 at 2:40:25 PM

Thank goodness it’s real JavaScript and not that knockoff js unscrupulous vendors are using to cut costs

by bayesnet

12/31/2025 at 2:05:32 PM

Because OP let an LLM generate the text and couldn't be bothered to measure :)

by ramon156

12/31/2025 at 2:08:20 PM

"At the edge" means "on a server located close to where you are". It's used to serve the HTML.

Looks like the only JavaScript running on the client is for installing the service worker and some Cloudflare tracking junk.

by jakelazaroff

12/31/2025 at 2:17:08 PM

Workers doesn’t require JS to serve static content though. You upload it as a static asset and it does it for you.

by aprilnya

12/31/2025 at 2:14:48 PM

Right, but any old CDN can do that. Why does it need CF workers?

by cuu508

12/31/2025 at 1:15:24 PM

My blog directory/search engine [1] runs on Cloudflare workers as well. I was able to get pretty good results, too. For example, the listing of 1200+ blogs [2], each with 5 latest posts, loads in ~500ms. A single post with a list of related posts, loads in ~200ms. Yeah, it's still a lot, but it includes all the normal web app logic like auth middlewares, loading user settings, and states; everything is rendered server-side, no rich frontend code (apart from htmx for a couple of buttons to make simple one-off requests like "subscribe to blog" or "add to favorites"). A static page (like /about) usually loads in ~100ms.

This is a bit stochastic because of regions and dynamic allocation of resources. So, e.g. if you're the first user from a large georgraphic region to visit the website in the last several hours, your first load will be longer.

My other project (a blog platform) contains a lot of optimizations, so posts [3] load pretty much as fast as that example from the thread, i.e. 60-70ms.

1. https://minifeed.net/

2. https://minifeed.net/blogs

3. https://rakhim.exotext.com/but-what-if-i-really-want-a-faste...

by freetonik

12/31/2025 at 3:16:00 PM

For static content this isn't fast.

For a dynamic service, well.. maybe implement something of interest and then we can discuss.

by yuvadam

12/31/2025 at 6:27:27 PM

> Immutable caching Cache-Control:max-age=31536000, immutable

Why brag about how it's not static content, if you're just going to tell the browser to cache it until the end of time anyways?

by ahepp

12/31/2025 at 2:03:23 PM

> ~2.5KB Brotli Smaller than most images.

Brotli is so 2024. Use zstd. (73.62%, I know. Slightly worse compression ratio, I know that too.)

by oefrha

12/31/2025 at 5:49:37 PM

Do browsers use a custom dictionary for zstd (I don’t think so since I can precompress zstd content server-side)?

Brotli was designed for html compression so despite/while being a relatively inferior algorithm, its stock dictionary is all html/css/js-trained/optimized. Chrome/Blink recently added support for seeing content compressed with a bespoke dictionary, but that only works for massive sites that have a heavily skewed new/returning visit ratio (because of the cost of shipping both the compressed content and the dictionary).

Long story short, I could see br being better than zstd for basic web purposes.

by ComputerGuru

12/31/2025 at 1:45:59 PM

This is interesting and need to look into.

I decided to go check my website’s PageSpeed and I do have a 100/100/100/100 with pretty lots of content on the homepage including 6 separate thumbnails.

My site is on a straight path, no tricks — Github Pages Served to the Internet by Cloudflare.

by Brajeshwar

12/31/2025 at 2:55:12 PM

These are not impressive numbers and, obviously, browser cache is fast.

Pretty much any small payload/non-javascript site is going to render very quickly (and instantly from cache) making SSL time be the long pole.

by liveoneggs

12/31/2025 at 2:06:50 PM

well yes alright but it would be more impressive if there was actually something interesting there to see

by 1317

12/31/2025 at 2:48:40 PM

Speed: 217ms 289ms

I have 5G network :)

Also, heard multiple times that edge network can be worse, because if you're low prio and other part of globe is not busy, you get it routed in worst possible way.

by predkambrij

12/31/2025 at 3:19:33 PM

Getting a site to load quickly isn't that difficult from a technical perspective. You just need to strip out everything that slows it down. If you can deliver a page of HTML and inlined CSS that renders without JS or images then your site will be fast (or at least it'll be perceived as fast, which is fine.) So long as you're using some fairly reputable hosting infrastructure (AWS, Azure, Google, etc), and if you're rendering on the server you're not doing silly things on the hot path, then you don't need to worry about speed.

The hard part when it comes to site optimization is persuading various stakeholders who want GTM, Clarity, Dynatrace, DataDog, New Relic, 7 different ad retargeters, Meta, X, and probably AI as well now that a fast loading website is more important than the data they get from whichever of those things they happen to be interested in.

For any individual homepage where that stuff isn't an issue because the owner is making all the decisions, it's fair to say that if your site loads slowly it's because you chose to make it slow. For any large business, it's because 'the business' chose to make it slow.

by onion2k

12/31/2025 at 5:52:41 PM

Exactly. My site loads fast with no images causes it is a demo site. Sure Jan!

by a456463

12/31/2025 at 3:44:32 PM

[flagged]

by koakuma-chan

12/31/2025 at 3:54:44 PM

Start your own company.

Eventually you'll want to know what users are doing, and specifically why they're not doing what you expected them to do after you spent ages crafting the perfect user journeys around your app. Then you'll start wondering if installing something to record sessions is actually a great idea that could really help you optimize things for people and get them more engaged (and spending more money.)

Fast forward three years, and you'll be looking at the source of a page wondering how things got so bad.

by onion2k

12/31/2025 at 4:49:59 PM

You forgot the best bit - not removing the ones you no longer use!

by razakel

12/31/2025 at 4:29:34 PM

> Eventually you'll want to know what users are doing, and specifically why they're not doing what you expected them to do after you spent ages crafting the perfect user journeys around your app

That's putting the cart before the horse. The way it's properly done is just to invite a few users and measure and track their interaction with your software. And this way you'd have good feedback instead of frustrating your real users with slow software.

by skydhash

12/31/2025 at 5:37:46 PM

Yeah, you'll do that, and get great feedback, and then when you roll it out to other users they'll do weird stuff you've not seen any of the test group try before.

Users being weird are the fundamental root cause of all software problems. :)

by onion2k

12/31/2025 at 6:11:43 PM

Users can’t click a button that does not exist. It’s on product and engineering to curtail what the user can do. Optimizing for the happy path while not eliminating the incorrect flow is just bad software engineering.

by skydhash

12/31/2025 at 10:23:47 PM

Yeah I agree. I bet that guy is using JavaScript and MongoDB or something, and he is wondering why things break.

by koakuma-chan

12/31/2025 at 3:04:29 PM

Speed:

- 3942ms

- 4281ms

Guess it depends on your region. This is from East-Asia.

by RestartKernel

12/31/2025 at 6:32:48 PM

hmm, it seems the last static site I did is slightly faster https://nissestyrelsen.dk/ but probably just because it's hosted in country near me, if I was somewhere else probably much worse. Not that I care that much to really research it, I figure it's fast enough and just a funny idea.

by bryanrasmussen

12/31/2025 at 6:36:37 PM

my luck HN gonna crash it.

by bryanrasmussen

12/31/2025 at 3:05:18 PM

Wish more pages were as fast as this, despite this site’s simplicity… In particular GitHub could really benefit from less bloat and faster rendering.

by meling

12/31/2025 at 3:06:28 PM

It's not fast.

by JodieBenitez

12/31/2025 at 2:02:55 PM

another trick is adding speculation rules on MPA sites. so when you hover over a link the page gets prerendered. For example, my initial page takes ~80ms, but navigating to other pages take 20ms

    prerender: [
      {
         where: { href_matches: '/*' },
         eagerness: 'moderate'
      }
    ]
That doesn't work on Safari, FF, and Brave, but you could do something like this:

https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton/blob/main/www/src/_as...

by efortis

12/31/2025 at 2:16:57 PM

Most adblockers/privacy extensions disable this.

uBlock Origin does it by default for instance.

by chmod775

12/31/2025 at 2:21:45 PM

Do they block <link rel=prefetch> completely?

On Brave, the workaround on that linked snippet bypasses their blocking.

by efortis

12/31/2025 at 6:56:05 PM

Well, uBlock Origin sets network.prefetch-next=false and network.dns.disablePrefetch=true, so yes.

The reason is that browser prefetching may hit URLs that were intended to be blocked.

by chmod775

12/31/2025 at 3:06:37 PM

Over 800ms is not even a little fast. I’m on WiFi to ADSL, lights static websites are way faster than that.

by dontlaugh

12/31/2025 at 2:24:04 PM

The perfect lighthouse score might have changed since this was last updated. Am seeing 97% on accessibility.

by s_ting765

12/31/2025 at 8:18:13 PM

I still appreciate that you shared this even though other comments are correct that there isn’t much content on the page. Frankly speaking, more devs should put more thought into performance.

I’m currently working on a small e-commerce store for myself, written in SvelteKit (frontend) and Go (backend) and one of my core objectives is to make it fast. Not crazy fast, but looking for TTFB < 50-70ms for an average Polish user. Will definitely share it once it’s public.

by suralind

12/31/2025 at 6:37:30 PM

First load took 3.8 seconds for me.

by underdeserver

12/31/2025 at 5:01:06 PM

What does this page do that needs workers though? Looks like it could be static HTML to me.

I think most sites could either be static HTML and use a CDN, or they need a database and pretty much have to be located in one place anyway.

It's quite hard to think of use cases where that isn't true.

by IshKebab

12/31/2025 at 1:09:21 PM

I believe CF Page is faster.

by est

12/31/2025 at 1:10:57 PM

CF pages is built on top of workers, you can serve static html assets from either of them too.

by mpeg

12/31/2025 at 3:33:58 AM 

  Speed:
  74ms
  241ms
… LOL …

These 30 ms and 4 ms numbers were typical Apache to Netscape from MAE East and MAE West in 1998. Twenty five years and orders of magnitude more computing later? Same numbers.

by Terretta

12/31/2025 at 1:22:09 PM

But now it's that fast from almost everywhere on the planet, with nearly zero effort from the developer. We've been limited by light speed here, not compute.

by davidmurdoch

12/31/2025 at 1:50:16 PM

I get 381ms/401ms on first load and not the claimed ~30ms. I'm not really sure what the point is here though. CDNs and browser cache headers work? Static sites are fast to paint?

by gnz11

12/31/2025 at 2:08:53 PM

Yeah, I'm not seeing fast uncached times either. I usually hit Cloudflare's Miami datacenter, which is only about 200 miles and very low latency. But I'm seeing 200+ms on this site right now.

by davidmurdoch

12/31/2025 at 3:48:38 PM

Most cloudflare products are very slow / offer very poor performance. I was surprised by this but that’s just how it is. It basically negates any claimed performance advantage.

Durable objects, r2 as well as tunnel have been particularly poor performing in my experience. Workers has not been a great experience either.

R2 in particular has been the slowest / highest latency s3 alternative I ever had experience with, falling behind backblaze b2, wasabi and even hetzner’s object storage.

by Eikon

12/31/2025 at 4:44:43 PM

got 12/31ms and 6/13ms cached so Cloudlfare muat not be that slow in Europe after all... ;)

by aatd86

12/31/2025 at 2:44:12 PM

I also got initial load times in that range.

The site should be faster, though. I’ve had a small CF workers project that works correctly with quick load times.

by Aurornis

12/31/2025 at 5:54:03 PM

The circumference of Earth at the equator is about 40,000 km and the speed of light is about 300,000 km/s. The appropriate division results in about 0.13 s.

That seems to track. The vast majority of requests won’t go half way around the Earth, so maybe halving that time at 0.06 seems like a reasonable target.

by coherentpony

12/31/2025 at 7:14:23 PM

Light travels at about 0.69c in fiber optic cables (c being the speed of light in vacuum, which, as you stated, is about 300,000 km/s).

by AnonC

1/2/2026 at 12:26:43 AM

Ah yes I forgot about that. Thanks for the correction.

by coherentpony

12/31/2025 at 2:26:58 PM

Not to mention that device count went up million fold.

by ivanjermakov

12/31/2025 at 2:27:52 PM

Great point!

by davidmurdoch

12/31/2025 at 1:59:47 PM

nah, most sites are fat enough that both bandwidth and compute is the limit.

Getting it closer can save you 50-150ms, but if whole load takes 1s+ that's minuscule

by PunchyHamster

12/31/2025 at 2:05:04 PM

I only meant in this example. I agree, sites in general are fat.

by davidmurdoch

12/31/2025 at 1:22:07 PM

I know, right? Almost 30 years and no progress in the speed of light? What are all these engineers even doing?

by usrnm

12/31/2025 at 1:23:39 PM

Right right! Like we used to have concord back in the day and we are just getting slower innit.

by nrhrjrjrjtntbt

12/31/2025 at 1:28:54 PM

For real

by kenonet

12/31/2025 at 5:41:05 PM

I believe that FTL communication (if it's achievable) will start out in data centers at small scales. Perhaps millimeters.

Possibly as an extension of Quantum Computing where some probabilistic asymmetry can be taken advantage of. The QC itself might not be faster than classical computing, but the FTL comms could improve memory and cache access.

Also MetaGoog will use it to serve up hyper personalized ads in their Gemini based Metaverse.

by elcritch

12/31/2025 at 3:28:32 PM

Speed: 350ms 1330ms

Is the site getting slower?

by neogodless

12/31/2025 at 2:27:41 PM

Physics. It's literally just physics.

And with Workers they're accessible from hundreds of locations around the world so you can get this sort of speed from almost anywhere.

by weird-eye-issue

12/31/2025 at 9:10:44 PM

Am I crazy? Why do I feel like all the text on the page was written by a LLM? I started seeing this everywhere

by efilife

12/31/2025 at 1:50:59 PM

Yeah, it's really quick because there is pretty much nothing on it

by jasoncartwright

12/31/2025 at 3:07:43 PM

I agree. Not impressed, frankly. Cloudflare workers is just even-more localized CDN, and the benefit is so tiny that it's not worth the investment nor maintenance costs. (I wrote extensively about this non-thing here: https://wskpf.com/takes/you-dont-need-a-cdn-for-seo). My site (https://wskpf.com), which has way more elements and, err, stuff, loads in 50ms, and unless you are superman or an atomic clock, you wouldn't care. same lighthouse scores as this one, but with no CDN nor cloudflare workers, and it actually has stuff on it.

by amosWeiskopf

12/31/2025 at 3:52:14 PM

TCP performance gets quite poor over long distances. CDNs are very helpful if you're trying to make your site work well far away from your servers.

by maxmcd

1/1/2026 at 6:42:46 PM

I think the bottleneck is rarely CDN. Think about it - my server sits in Germany. My target audience is in the US. My latency to the west coast is 150ms. I can see it being a big thing in competitive online game, but for website load performance it's less than the blink of an eye. The real bottleneck is usually poorly configured page or some bloated JS.

by amosWeiskopf

12/31/2025 at 9:04:54 PM

Your site took over a second to load for me from Brazil. Are you sure CDNs are that worthless?

by doodlesdev

1/1/2026 at 6:29:03 PM

I do, because the 120ms latency that CDN solves is a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.5 seconds (desktop) or 8 seconds (mobile) it takes for the average website to load almost entirely due to un-optimized images and poor code (based on https://www.hostinger.com/in/tutorials/website-load-time-sta...)

by amosWeiskopf

12/31/2025 at 5:36:01 PM

next stop: lets install nextjs and give it a try shall we?

by vivzkestrel

12/31/2025 at 5:14:27 PM

"TL;DR: This isn't a cached HTML file. Real code runs at the edge in ~30ms. After your first visit:~4ms from browser cache!"

Maybe add some dynamic feature for the demo so that we don't need to trust you and be surprised at a nothingburger.

by TZubiri

12/31/2025 at 2:22:09 PM

"A super fast static website using Cloudflare workers"

Add imagery and see if you get the same results. I expect you could achieve such with Base64 but the caveat would be larger file sizes.

by doublerabbit

12/31/2025 at 1:23:28 PM

Is this real?

by aleksandrm