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 Is ASPS compatible with Cloudfare security
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abzane
Starting Member

Egypt
1 Posts

Posted - 26/11/2022  Reply with Quote
Our websites uses Cloudfare for security and page speed. Are there any known issues with this type of service?

Admin
Forum Admin

Australia
41 Posts

Posted - 26/11/2022  Reply with Quote
Yes. But lets clarify compatibility... ASPS is a server side filter that encrypts the finally assembled web page before it leaves the server. By the time that ASPS gets the page it is already completely assembled HTML, so it doesn't matter which coding language or framework is used to deliver the data for those pages.

That being said, by the time third party services like Cloudfare get an ASPS web page to serve from their servers the HTML has been encrypted and will by now be a single meta-tag followed by an encrypted blob of data. But any service that compresses data in the hope of increasing page speed can pose a problem because in its infinite cleverness by removing that first meta-tag. By removing that first line ArtisBrowser will not know that the page is to be decrypted... the solution to prevent that is below.

First lets look at "page speed" and how its importance is exaggerated.

A typical web page can be comprised of 30-50 KB but in total, including scripts and images, be anywhere between 250-400 KB. Now when web pages are filtered to increase page speed, what services like Cloudfare are actually doing is removing anything found as "comments" that are not used to render a page, white space and line breaks to condense the html as much as possible. Now that might seem to be considerable if you have ever looked at a web page by view source, but lets look at the real significance.

Comments can add 20 bytes to file size. Line breaks can add 2 bytes and tabs add about 11 bytes. Note that a byte is about 1000th of a KB. We tested a typical page that includes all sorts of comments denoting start and end of header, footer, etc with lots of white space for coders to identify various parts and at most, removing all comments, line breaks and white space did reduce the page html from 42 to 37 KB. That is a huge saving is it not of 12%?

Well on the whole it is not much at all, because saving 5KB over a download of 345 KB is really only 1% so the question one can ask is why bother with page speed? Caching can have its advantages but compression for the sake of page speed can be done without.

How to disable Page Speed at Cloudfare

It is possible to still use Cloudfare for the site by disabling "pagespeed" for directories protected by ASPS.



Nominate the folder or common string, enclose in * to catch related variables. Then nominate "disable performance" which is the nuisance that strips comment types from HTML.
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Kendo
Moderator

Australia
21 Posts

Posted - 26/11/2022  Reply with Quote
A lot of CMS like WordPress have Page Speed plugins which may be popular. However such plugins are usually installed by the same people who install every plugin that they can get their hands on, unaware that each additional plugin will slow down their website more and some do come with a lot of baggage.
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