Optimal settings for Drupal based web sites

Hi Psegarel,

yes, it is broken probably because CloudFlare by now evolved and won't do so much harm to a Drupal site if CloudFlare is not configured up to what Drupal would expect.

So basically, just follow the recommendations on CloudFlare's web site please - we have all learned a lot in the meantime!

Juanzo: well, Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation seems to do something similar, but not quite. With the Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation, only one fraction of what CloudFlare can help you offload traffic from your server is done. Nonetheless, I also use Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation on my Drupal installs and CloudFlare at the same time on top of that.

Basically, CloudFlare is something completely different. It is a reverse proxy content delivery network. What it does is easy: it will scan your site for any static file it finds (typical candidats are images, CSS files and JavaScript-Files). If these files are not yet optimized of some sorts, CloudFlare offers to do that job for you but at a small price. Even with the CloudFlare module installed, CloudFlare can only guess to see if it makes things right whereas the Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation module actively hooks into what is going on inside Drupal.

The real advantage of CloudFlare hence is not aggregating and compressing CSS and JS files so much (that's i.a. Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation module's speciality). Rather, CloudFlare stores all static files it finds on their server. When a user requests your site in a browser, all IP requests first go to CloudFlare. It looks into its own cache to see if it already holds one of your static image, CSS or JS files and without pulling it from your own server, it sends out these static files for you from their own phalanx of web servers around the globe.

This reduces the load your web server experiences as it won't have to deal at all with always delivering the same theme images, content images, CSS and JS files to your users. Your server hence has more power left to do the heavier lifting like computing what you want to display in views or do other logic you added to your Drupal installation.

So my recommendation: combine Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation with CloudFlare!