Fastly Instant Purge™: Under 150ms for Over a Decade

Cloudflare recently announced their ability to provide “instant purge” in under 150ms. This is good news for everyone and we’d like to formally welcome them to the club! Now that we’re not the only vendor capable of instantly purging, the internet is better, and as a result, more users are happier. 

This announcement brings back fond memories from thirteen years ago when we were first building our purging platform. Our customers have now been enjoying our Instant Purge™ capabilities for over a decade (and not much in engineering accomplishments can be measured in decades).  

What is Fastly’s Instant Purge™?

Since 2011, Fastly has been able to purge content globally in 150ms*, allowing our customers to re-imagine their content publishing workflows. Customers no longer had a delay between their decision to remove content from their global cache footprint and the actual purge.

The traditional view in the industry used to be that you purge when something went wrong, for example, publishing incorrect information. Our belief from day one was that purging is something you should be able to do as part of normal business. It's not just there to recover from errors, it should be part of the modern app development process and strategy for caching and serving content. With instant purging, you can cache what was previously seen as uncachable – frequently changing dynamic content like sports scores, inventory, stock tickers, API requests, personalized content, and more. As more people expect purging to be done in an instant (and more people should want this!) the better the internet will get for end-users everywhere.

We provide the flexibility to purge what you want (whether that’s a single item or URL purge, purge all, surrogate key, or hard/soft purging), when you want, manually or programmatically through our API or CLI. We have no hard limits on purging, enabling our customers to scale and innovate as needed—and we’ve never charged a premium for it either.

Expertly purging for over ten years

We have been helping major publishers, ecommerce companies, and many other industries purge for over thirteen years – but we’re also continuously working on making sure our purging is fast and efficient. And that’s why we’ve been hands-on, offering seriously superior service, access to experts, and an active community to answer your questions and help at any hour of the day. We work with you to optimize for your unique purging needs, whether that’s based on regions, locations of end-users, or other criteria. We’re happy to talk about our 150ms Instant Purge™ capabilities, but what else do you need to meet your goals? Let’s find out together.

Solving business problems for our customers is at the heart of our mission to make the internet fast, safe, and engaging.

Can Instant Purge™ get even more instant?

You might be wondering if we can push purge performance even further. Can Fastly’s Instant Purge™ get even more instant? The short answer is “no”, but let’s explore why.

In any globally distributed large-scale system, there are roughly four timing elements: 

• Pre-processing: The amount of time it takes to process API interactions into purge requests

• Network Transmission: How long it takes for the messages to be sent across the network

• Processing: How long it takes to perform the intended task

• Error handling: How the system detects failures and how quickly it can recover from them

The magic of Instant Purge™ is that network transmission time is the majority of timing - which means we are only limited by the speed of light! The laws of physics give us a theoretical fastest purge time of about 65ms, which is the time it takes light to travel from one side of the planet to the other. We also need to account for some processing time, buffering, and retransmitting delays, as well as the fact that cables don’t go in completely straight lines, so 150ms is around the limit for a global purge. Simply put, with our Instant Purge™ system we have reached the pinnacle of response time for a globally distributed large-scale system and are capped by laws of physics. And we’ve been at this point for over a decade.

Better applications mean a better internet

We have always tried to be ahead of the curve and consider the quickly evolving nature of the internet. And truly, we love seeing more people (and our competition) do what we’ve been doing since 2011. We built an advanced platform knowing others would catch up eventually. It's better for the internet and it’s better architecture for building applications. More apps can be built that rely on real-time data with real-time content control that can be scaled globally because there is more than one provider that can do it. That makes the internet a better place, and it makes users happier. We're excited to see what you will build! (And you can try us for free)

*150ms mean purge time to clear cached content globally, re-confirmed on December 31, 2022