> To clarify, Fastly did not perform any benchmarks on Cloudflare's network. We ran our own benchmark…

Am I the only having cognitive dissonance here? I was confused how they complained about not being able to perform benchmarks but then… ran a benchmark? There must be some distinction here that I’m missing

Fastly is unable to reproduce the benchmark against Cloudflare. They reproduced a modified (and theoretically improved) benchmark against their own service, but then had to compare it to the original values provided by Cloudflare.

CloudFlare ran a benchmark on both services and published their results. The contention is that the benchmark did not represent fastly performance fairly, so fastly reran the benchmark in what they consider to be a fair way, on their service only. They did not retest CloudFlare in their benchmark. The results in the post compare CloudFlare's results for CloudFlare and fastly's results for fastly

Yeah, ok that must be the distinction.

However, I see that the TOS says you may not "perform or publish" benchmarks. Seems this still violates the "or publish" part, even if Fastly avoided doing the performing. What would be the point of forbidding publishing if it is already forbidden to perform said benchmarks in the first place? The TOS seems to also forbid publishing on the benchmark even when someone else performs the Fastly part of the benchmark.

Edit: It must be the TOS doesn't apply if you don't use the service.

Fortunately, no one needed to agree to the CloudFlare ToS to read their blog post.

Haha. Actually, now that I think about it, I guess the TOS doesn't apply if you don't use the service!

Sorry, I was trying to clarify in my comment but failed to put it through clearly. When I say "We ran our own benchmark" I mean Fastly ran a benchmark on a Fastly Compute@Edge service.