Cpvr
Rookie Contributor
Cloudflare has introduced a new feature, Speedbrain, which can help you speed up your forum if its enabled.
Here’s the news post from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-speed-brain
Today we are very excited to share the latest leap forward in speed: Speed Brain. It relies on the Speculation Rules API to prefetch the content of the user's likely next navigations. The main goal of Speed Brain is to download a web page to the browser cache before a user navigates to it, allowing pages to load almost instantly when the actual navigation takes place.
Our initial approach uses a conservative model that prefetches static content for the next page when a user starts a touch or click event. Through the fourth quarter of 2024 and into 2025, we will offer more aggressive speculation models, such as speculatively prerendering (not just fetching the page before the navigation happens but rendering it completely) for an even faster experience. Eventually, Speed Brain will learn how to eliminate latency for your static website, without any configuration, and work with browsers to make sure that it loads as fast as possible.
To illustrate, imagine an ecommerce website selling clothing. Using the insights from our global request logs, we can predict with high accuracy that a typical visitor is likely to click on ‘Shirts’ when viewing the parent page ‘Mens > Clothes’. Based on this, we can start delivering static content, like images, before the shopper even clicks the ‘Shirts’ link. As a result, when they inevitably click, the page loads instantly. Recent lab testing of our aggressive loading model implementation has shown up to a 75% reduction in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the time it takes for the largest visible element (like an image, video, or text block) to load and render in the browser.
The best part? We are making Speed Brain available to all plan types immediately and at no cost. Simply toggle on the Speed Brain feature for your website from the dashboard or the API. It’ll feel like magic, but behind the scenes it's a lot of clever engineering.
We have already enabled Speed Brain by default on all free domains and are seeing a reduction in LCP of 45% on successful prefetches.Pro, Business, and Enterprise domains need to enable Speed Brain manually. If you have not done so already, we strongly recommend also enabling Real User Measurements (RUM) via your dashboard so you can see your new and improved web page performance. As a bonus, enabling RUM for your domain will help us provide improved and customized prefetching and prerendering rules for your website in the near future!
Behind the scenes, all of this magic is made possible by the Speculation Rules API, which is an emerging standard in the web performance space from Google. When Cloudflare’s Speed Brain feature is enabled, an HTTP header called Speculation-Rules is added to web page responses. The value for this header is a URL that hosts an opinionated Rules configuration. This configuration instructs the browser to initiate prefetch requests for future navigations. Speed Brain does not improve page load time for the first page that is visited on a website, but it can improve it for subsequent web pages that are visited on the same site.
The idea seems simple enough, but prefetching comes with challenges, as some prefetched content may never end up being used. With the initial release of Speed Brain, we have designed a solution with guardrails that addresses two important but distinct issues that limited previous speculation efforts — stale prefetch configuration and incorrect prefetching. The Speculation Rules API configuration we have chosen for this initial release has been carefully designed to balance safety of prefetching while still maintaining broad applicability of rules for the entire site.
Here’s the news post from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-speed-brain
Today we are very excited to share the latest leap forward in speed: Speed Brain. It relies on the Speculation Rules API to prefetch the content of the user's likely next navigations. The main goal of Speed Brain is to download a web page to the browser cache before a user navigates to it, allowing pages to load almost instantly when the actual navigation takes place.
Our initial approach uses a conservative model that prefetches static content for the next page when a user starts a touch or click event. Through the fourth quarter of 2024 and into 2025, we will offer more aggressive speculation models, such as speculatively prerendering (not just fetching the page before the navigation happens but rendering it completely) for an even faster experience. Eventually, Speed Brain will learn how to eliminate latency for your static website, without any configuration, and work with browsers to make sure that it loads as fast as possible.
To illustrate, imagine an ecommerce website selling clothing. Using the insights from our global request logs, we can predict with high accuracy that a typical visitor is likely to click on ‘Shirts’ when viewing the parent page ‘Mens > Clothes’. Based on this, we can start delivering static content, like images, before the shopper even clicks the ‘Shirts’ link. As a result, when they inevitably click, the page loads instantly. Recent lab testing of our aggressive loading model implementation has shown up to a 75% reduction in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the time it takes for the largest visible element (like an image, video, or text block) to load and render in the browser.
The best part? We are making Speed Brain available to all plan types immediately and at no cost. Simply toggle on the Speed Brain feature for your website from the dashboard or the API. It’ll feel like magic, but behind the scenes it's a lot of clever engineering.
We have already enabled Speed Brain by default on all free domains and are seeing a reduction in LCP of 45% on successful prefetches.Pro, Business, and Enterprise domains need to enable Speed Brain manually. If you have not done so already, we strongly recommend also enabling Real User Measurements (RUM) via your dashboard so you can see your new and improved web page performance. As a bonus, enabling RUM for your domain will help us provide improved and customized prefetching and prerendering rules for your website in the near future!
Enter Speed Brain: what makes it different?
Speed Brain offers a robust approach for implementing predictive prefetching strategies directly within the browser based on the ruleset returned by our servers. By building on lessons from previous attempts, it shifts the responsibility for resource prediction to the client, enabling more dynamic and personalized optimizations based on user interaction – like hovering over a link, for example – and their device capabilities. Instead of the browser sitting idly waiting for the next web page to be requested by the user, it takes cues from how a user is interacting with a page and begins asking for the next web page before the user finishes clicking on a link.Behind the scenes, all of this magic is made possible by the Speculation Rules API, which is an emerging standard in the web performance space from Google. When Cloudflare’s Speed Brain feature is enabled, an HTTP header called Speculation-Rules is added to web page responses. The value for this header is a URL that hosts an opinionated Rules configuration. This configuration instructs the browser to initiate prefetch requests for future navigations. Speed Brain does not improve page load time for the first page that is visited on a website, but it can improve it for subsequent web pages that are visited on the same site.
The idea seems simple enough, but prefetching comes with challenges, as some prefetched content may never end up being used. With the initial release of Speed Brain, we have designed a solution with guardrails that addresses two important but distinct issues that limited previous speculation efforts — stale prefetch configuration and incorrect prefetching. The Speculation Rules API configuration we have chosen for this initial release has been carefully designed to balance safety of prefetching while still maintaining broad applicability of rules for the entire site.
