New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Varnish or not Varnish?
Hello, on an webserver with various php scripts like Wordpress, Joomla, PHPBB
should i use Varnish? How big is the average page load time improvement or how much less load is caused when Varnish enabled? thank you
PS: here is varnish install tutorial: http://crybit.com/how-to-enable-varnish-in-cpanel-server/
Comments
What is your current server? if it's nginx, its cache system is pretty powerful and will take good advantage of your extra ram with the caching handled by the kernel. So I'd just use nginx kernel. if you use apache yeah, varnish could help (or nginx + cache).
Yes. Make sure you read its docs well though.
Yes, you should use Varnish. There will be a noticeable improvement.
I assume you are using something like cPanel? If not, and you are running your own installation, you would do much better to move to nginx+php-fpm and setup nginx fastcgi cache, Zend Opcache with php-fpm and then add memcached on the backend and install the needed plugin in WordPress to take advantage of memcached.
Also, spend some time tuning MySQL, most of the time your biggest hold up is MySQL. There are a lot of things you can tune to speed things up. The biggest which most people overlook is useing /dev/shm as your tmpdir so that selects and joins are performed in memory instead of on disk.
If you are stuck on using cPanel, then I would consider either:
A. Unixy Varnish
B. litespeed (which includes its own caching mech.)
Hope this helps.
Cheers!
Unixy Varnish is really quite good, but you'll have to pay for it as a cPanel plug in if you want customers to be able to empty their own caches.