your intuition that there is lazy-loading going on is correct; each CDN node (and there may be up to a dozen in one location, this is true east coast and west coast US) maintains its own cache, and that cache is invalidated at deploy time, and refilled only when a request is received. On our non-enterprise CDN, there is very high cache contention so further the file contents will fall out of cache quite quickly, in case your page has only sporadic access on a particular CDN node.
Now, the TTFB still shouldn’t be seconds - more like hundreds of milliseconds - unless you have some misconfiguration in DNS to not use our CDN optimally, or some other odd configuration like a proxy in front of us which is not a supported configuration. Two requests:
- can you tell me what the hostname for your site is so I can check DNS config?
- If you have such a slow load and can get us the value of the HTTP response header called
x-nf-request-idthat would be useful for us to see if we can understand if the delay is inside our network or outside (we maintain timing records for every request in our internal logs and can reference them by that ID).
There is no intention that you would push your site contents to the cache, as we don’t want to cache them if there are no requests, so there’s nothing you can do aside from following the advice here to optimize that setup: