I compared deploy speeds for Reflame, Vercel, Netlify, CF Pages on the same repo

by lewisl9029on 11/24/2022, 1:23 AMwith 3 comments

by sdfhbdfon 11/24/2022, 2:29 AM

It is a very cool ad for author's service - Reflame.

It'd be interesting to compare the scale at which these providers operate and see if the deploy time grew over time as the company grew.

I am wondering if Reflame would be able to achieve the same results if it had even quarter of customer base as Cloudflare or Netlify or Vercel.

The biggest limitation, and apples-to-oranges of this comparison is that it seems to me - from what I gather from the homepage - that Reflow only allows to deploy React. The bigger players listed allow all sorts of frameworks and runtimes to be deployed to their edge. I am guessing that optimizing for a one very specific configuration - React is way easier than to support many different flavors and build systems.

Lastly:

     Every service tested here, except Reflame, currently uses the term "instant" to describe their preview deploys:
This is a little disingenious since you did write "Reflame deploys client-rendered React web apps instantly" in your Show HN [1] so maybe don't be hypocritical.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134059

by lewisl9029on 11/24/2022, 1:23 AM

Hi HN, author here. I set out to do a casual comparison of deploy speeds between Reflame (disclaimer, I built Reflame) and other popular services on a near-stock Vite React app, not expecting a whole lot of differences between the others (since most of them were just spinning up VMs/Containers and running the same CLI tools).

I ended up finding out that Netlify had some rather long queuing times that made it ~10s slower than the duration it reports, putting it well behind Vercel (which reports similar a similar duration), but still ahead of Cloudflare Pages (which suffers due to doing a bunch of things irrelevant to the simple Vite app I was deploying).

Meanwhile, Reflame consistently finishes deploying before I can even finish creating the PR. :)

If this piqued your interest for Reflame, I have a demo on https://reflame.app, and more technical details on my Show HN launch post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134059). Give it a shot if you're building a client-rendered React web app, and tired of waiting for minute-long deploys that break your flow every time you want to share your work. :)