Debunking Cloudflare’s recent performance tests
OK...<p>So, I&#x27;m the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers. In complete honestly, I did not even know we ran some sort of comparison benchmark with Compute@Edge until Fastly complained about it, nor did I know about our ToS clause until Fastly complained about it. I honestly don&#x27;t know anything about either beyond what&#x27;s publicly visible.<p>But as long as we&#x27;re already mud slinging, I&#x27;d like to take the opportunity to get a little something off my chest. Fastly has been trumpeting for years that Compute@Edge has 35 microsecond cold starts, or whatever, and repeatedly posting blog posts comparing that against 5 milliseconds for Workers, and implying that they are 150x faster. If you look at the details, it turns out that 35 microsecond time is actually how long they take to start a new request, given that the application is already loaded in memory. A hot start, not a cold start. Whereas Workers&#x27; 5ms includes time to load the application from disk (which is the biggest contributor to total time). Our hot start time is also a few microseconds, but that doesn&#x27;t seem like an interesting number?<p>We never called this out, it didn&#x27;t seem worth arguing over. But excuse me if I&#x27;m not impressed by claims of false comparisons...<p>On a serious note, I&#x27;ve been saying for decades that benchmarks are almost always meaningless, because different technologies will have different strengths and weaknesses, so you usually can&#x27;t tell anything about how <i>your</i> use case will perform unless you actually test that use case.  So, I would encourage everyone to run your own test and don&#x27;t just go on other people&#x27;s numbers. It&#x27;s great that Fastly has opened up C@E for self-service testing so that people can actually try it out.