Performance of folktunefinder.com and Cloudflare

Long story short

I put Cloudflare and a CAPTCHA on Folk Tune Finder. It’s a pragmatic decision, which ensures that the limited resources of the site are used for the people it’s intended for. It’s an uneasy trade-off that doesn’t align with all of my principles. It does, though, align with the fundamental principle of folk tune finder: helping people to find tunes.

Long story long

If you’ve visited folktunefinder.com since 2018 you will have seen a banner leading to this blog post. That banner hasn’t changed in nearly 8 years. I don’t know where the intervening time has gone. I do know where my attention has gone: I have been busy with a child, two demanding changes in jobs, and there was a pandemic.

I did actually make a start on a new generation of Folk Tune Finder code, but life got in the way and it was never complete enough to release it. I’d still love to achieve the high-minded ideals set out in that post. I hope that one day I will. But I had a lot of other things on my plate!

A few people have written to me of late to say that the site was getting a bit sluggish. I had noticed a massive uptick in traffic that was not attributable just to a growth in human users. Long story short, it was web crawlers for AI bots.

I also get all kinds of lovely emails, some of them quite detailed. If you’ve mailed me and I haven’t responded, I’m sorry. I’ve just not had time. I hope you try again one day.

Yelling at Clouds

I remember very clearly when I first heard about Cloudflare. It was round about 2011 and a colleague showed me, because they thought it was cool. The value proposition was was as much about TLS termination as anything else (HTTPS wasn’t yet unbiquitous or cheap). I thought the idea was bad for a few reasons. The idea of letting someone else terminate your TLS connections seemed wrong. And it was an obvious point of centralisation and therefore both control and failure.

Old man yells at cloud meme

Ever since then I have played the role of old man who yells at clouds. Every now and again there has been a Cloudflare outage that takes out lots of the Web. I curse when I see a interstitial Cloudflare screen and the people who let pragmatism get in the way of principle.

I have three quarrels with Cloudflare and similar services:

  1. They use user-agent as a proxy measure for human-ness. I think as long as you’re a human, you should be able to access the web using whatever tools you want. Verifying user agent (i.e. choice of browser) runs counter to the ideals of open source, which is important for freedom.
  2. There’s a huge risk of centralisation. Centralised single points of control are natural choke-point for oppresive governments, commercial interests, etc. It’s also a huge potential single point of failure. The diversity of the Internet is its strength, and this isn’t it.
  3. It can be used to gate-keep resources that should be considered public or essential services. These should not be restricted.

Folk Tune Finder is obviously very low stakes compared to these objections.

Solving a Problem

So, Folk Tune Finder got so slow that it was effectively broken.

I tried blocking the AI bots manually, but I only have so much time.

So here I am enabling Cloudflare.

The alternative is that the site collapses under the load and no-one can use it. I hope there’s an alternative one day. If there are some users who fail the CAPTCHA, I’m truly sorry that the balancing act didn’t work in your case.

You may curse me for using CloudFlare, as I have cursed others. But you may also search for folk tunes.