FA users are reporting that around November 19th, "the quality of images became especially bad."
How can I fix this? (FA issue) by Siroc,
FA image quality explained by Waccoon
CloudFlare's image optimization is configurable between:
- Off
- Basic (Lossless): Reduce the size of PNG, JPEG, and GIF files with no impact on visual quality.
- High (Lossy): Further reduce the size of JPEG files for faster image loading. Larger JPEGs are converted to progressive images, loading a lower-resolution image first and ending in a higher-resolution version. Not recommend for photography sites that exhibit hi-res images.
By November 19th, a little over one month after enabling CloudFlare, FA configured CloudFlare's optimization to High (Lossy). About a week before that,
Fender posted CloudFlare stats showing that FA's total bandwidth was 27.9+61.4=89.3 TB. Assuming that's 27 days between FA recovering on October 17 through the journal on November 13, FA's transferring about 3.3 TB/day, or about 99 TB/month.
Yak commented "I will be looking at disabling/configuring this feature to hopefully disallow recompression of data that comes from *.facdn since its quality is something we are managing on our side." but there's been no updates, and the compression remains lossy.
I'm speculating that FA hit 100 TB transfer in 30 days, triggering a CloudFlare rep to investigate, who contacted FA to upsell the Enterprise plan ("averages $5,000 monthy") from their current Business ($200/month) plan, ultimately suggesting that FA enable image compression to stay under 100 TB/month.
Something similar happened to a 100 TB user on the free plan last year.
How Much Traffic is Too Much Traffic For CloudFlare? quotes a CloudFlare rep saying "At 100TB/mo., pure file delivery, you'd need to be an Enterprise customer. Let me know if this works within your budget."
FA transfers too much to stay on CloudFlare's cheaper plans unless their high lossy compression goes unnoticed, but users are starting to complain.
