CloudFlare Clouding Pulpconnection?

So when Dreamhost and CloudFlare announced their partnership, it seemed too good to be true. A content delivery network (CDN), an optimizer, extra security, analytics all for free? I had to try it out, and I did.

A few days after the announcement, CloudFlare seemed to be living up to its promises. But in the following week, strange things began to happen. Pulpconnection responded slowly, not necessarily bombing out as with past outages, but something wasn’t right. Then came the 502 Bad Gateway errors off and on.

Google searches brought up similar complaints after moving to CloudFlare. To help alleviate the complaints, there is this CloudFlare support wiki entry with some performance suggestions. I installed the CloudFlare plugin with database optimizer function, but that hasn’t seemed to help.

Because of slower performance, I noticed a drop in traffic over the past week starting around April 20.

I’m not sure if the service is simply overwhelmed with an influx of DreamHost customers. While I want to continue using this service, right now it just feels too unstable. It’s up, it’s down. It’s working, it’s not working. Sometimes, performance is excellent, but at many other times, even I can’t stand the sluggishness.

Do I keep CloudFlare, hoping their service scales and stabilizes? I’ll give it a few more days before making a decision.