How can you optimize Caddy for high-traffic websites?

Caddy performs well out of the box, but a few adjustments matter once traffic grows.

• Enable HTTP/3 to cut connection setup latency for repeat visitors on supporting clients.
• Tune reverse_proxy timeouts and keep-alives so idle backend connections are reused instead of re-established for every request.
• Turn on active health checks with health_uri so traffic is pulled off a failing upstream automatically.
• Raise OS-level file descriptor limits (ulimit -n) since every open connection consumes one.
• Serve static assets directly with file_server rather than proxying them through the app server, and enable encode for compressible content.
• Use a CDN or edge cache in front of Caddy for cacheable content, since Caddy itself is not a general-purpose HTTP cache.
• Scale horizontally behind a load balancer, or use reverse_proxy's own load balancing across multiple backend instances.

Most of these are small config changes rather than infrastructure rewrites, which is consistent with Caddy's design goal of being fast without heavy manual tuning.