Cloudflare Argo Benchmark and Speed Test

A few days ago, Cloudflare announced Argo, their new solution for a faster, more reliable, more secure Internet. My first thought was of course to perform an Argo benchmark to see how well it works.

I’ve previously taken a look at the Cloudflare Pro plan, and I’ve been paying for it ever since despite it not actually being of that much use to me.

Argo however appears to be exactly what I’m interested in, a new way of squeezing out yet more performance, so let’s find out how Cloudflare’s new Argo service performs with some benchmarks!

About Argo

I’ll just quickly touch on what Cloudflare Argo is, I suggest reading their full blog post for full details.

From my understanding, before Argo, when you browse to a website behind Cloudflare, the request would hit a nearby Cloudflare Point of Presence (PoP). If an item is not cached from here the request would traverse the Internet to reach the origin, that is the web server that actually hosts the content.

Argo makes use of Cloudflare’s large global network and attempts to more efficiently route the traffic to the origin server over their own network while applying some smarts to improve overall speed. Argo will additionally allow a PoP to check other nearby PoP’s to see if they have a requested item cached before taking the more expensive path to the origin server, so cache hit rate should also improve.

Before Argo

Let’s first start off with a baseline test, that is a benchmark before our Argo benchmark. I wanted to test from multiple points around the planet, unfortunately I don’t have a bunch of servers spread out all over the place ready to use so I opted to use Pingdom’s website speed test. At the moment there are 4 different locations that I can test from, which are listed below.

  • Stockholm, Sweden
  • Dalas, Texas, USA
  • Melbourne, Australia
  • San Jose, California

This seems fine for a quick and dirty test, but for a full in depth Argo benchmark test I’d probably need to look at scripting AWS instances to spin up all around the planet to perform hundreds of hits to my website in order to get a better average. I might take a look at that in the future, but for now let’s see if this quick test shows any improvement.

I performed 10 tests with Pingdom from each of the 4 locations to my website before and after paying for Argo, these are the average page load times for the website from each of the 4 locations with just the standard Cloudflare Pro plan.

LocationAverage time in ms
Stockholm821ms
Dalas659ms
Melbourne2280ms
San Jose856ms

I should also note that the origin web server is hosted in AWS on the US East coast, so unless we have a 100% cache hit rate some requests will be going back to this origin server. This explains why the Australia result is so much worse to the rest as it’s the furthest away by distance to the web server.

After Argo

After accepting to pay $5 per month + $0.10 per GB of bandwidth, Argo was activated and I ran the tests again, results below.

LocationAverage time in ms
Stockholm790ms
Dalas613ms
Melbourne1330ms
San Jose721ms

Here’s how the difference looks graphically.

Cloudflare Argo Speed Test Benchmark

So we can see that in most cases, Argo appears to offer a slight improvement. The improvement in Australia actually appears to be quite drastic, but I’m happy with that as I’m based in Australia.

Based purely on these results, I’ll probably keep Argo for a while and see how it goes. I’m quite happy to pay for faster speeds, even if those speeds are marginal in most cases, perhaps I’m crazy. I think the price is pretty fair, it’s not a huge barrier to entry so if you test it out be sure to let me know the speed differences that you see with Argo.

Summary

This was by no means an in depth and conclusive test, but I believe the quick and dirty Argo benchmark results have shown that Argo does have something to offer in terms of speeding up your website further. I think it’s an interesting offering to the Cloudflare stack and I’m interested to see what they bring out next.

Leave a comment ?

15 Comments.

  1. Interesting. Would be interesting to compare these with the baseline performance (without CloudFlare).

  2. Nice!! Thanks for this! I was just wondering about how big the difference would be. Can you update this post a month from now with cost? I guess it can be calculated/projected though.

    Thanks again.

    • No problem, sure thing! I have a good idea of the estimate for my site, but it will vary based on your bandwidth. I’ll update the post after my first month with the information.

  3. Nice! Please let us know about your costs in 1-2 months. Thank you!

  4. Looking at your waterfall reports…can you see where the time is being improved from? I’m curious to know if ARGO improves your TTFB.

    • I’d be really interested to know the answer to this too as it could improve Google PageSpeed Insights scores

  5. We’re in the US and do business exclusively with US customers. So the Sweden and Australia results are less important for us. For the US results, I’m not sure I want to pay for a .135s decrease in load time. I don’t think that’s even a perceptible difference for the avg user. If it were a decrease of 1 second, then I’d maybe reconsider.

    • this fellow said that he was Based in Australia, and the results from Australia are fantastic. So assumedly if he were based in the US it would be similar to the results in Australia. At least that is how I read it.

      • I’m not sure that’s the case, although I personally am in Australia, I used a third party service (pingdom) which tested from different countries, one of which happened to be Australia. So the same thing should happen with the US test for instance, eg the US pingdom server would have gone to a US Cloudflare PoP in the same manner. Australia does have pretty bad network infrastructure though, so it’s not too surprising that there is more of a difference here.

  6. do I need this if my site already using CDN services such as maxcdn?

    • You’d likely be using those services rather than Cloudflare itself, this is just an extra on top of Cloudflare that it offers. I am not sure what other providers offer a similar service of using their own network in this manner, I’ve heard of some before.

  7. i will buy it today, thanks for sharing ur experience Jarrod.

  8. Curious to know if you are still running Argo and what your thoughts are at this point?

    • I stopped it a couple of months ago, it could be more worthwhile for a larger site that sells product where you need maximum speed, but for my blog it didn’t seem worth spending extra for long term.

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