I have done this on websites running Tomcat, Wordpress, Drupal on both large installations and smaller ones. And decided to put a sample on how it affects Midcom/Midgard.
I did some preliminary tests on how it would work on this blog using one of my testservers for Varnish. Some small and simple rules made the website almost 3 times as fast. And this Varnish installation is not that optimized.
One of the things todo is to cache images .. we do that in vcl_fetch in the vcl code.
if (req.url ~ "\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|pdf|txt|tar|wav|bmp|rtf|flv|swf|html|htm)$") {
if (beresp.status == 200) {
remove beresp.http.Cache-Control;
remove beresp.http.Set-Cookie;
remove beresp.http.expires;
set beresp.http.magicmarker = "1";
set beresp.http.Cache-Control = "max-age=604800";
set beresp.ttl = 1d;
set beresp.cacheable = true;
}
}
Im using an unconfigured Siege on /blog for about 20 seconds.
Before Varnish:
Lifting the server siege... done. Transactions: 53 hits Availability: 100.00 % Elapsed time: 20.28 secs Data transferred: 1.53 MB Response time: 4.43 secs Transaction rate: 2.61 trans/sec Throughput: 0.08 MB/sec Concurrency: 11.58 Successful transactions: 53 Failed transactions: 0 Longest transaction: 12.66 Shortest transaction: 0.72
After Varnish:
Lifting the server siege... done. Transactions: 170 hits Availability: 100.00 % Elapsed time: 20.11 secs Data transferred: 4.88 MB Response time: 1.21 secs Transaction rate: 8.45 trans/sec Throughput: 0.24 MB/sec Concurrency: 10.19 Successful transactions: 170 Failed transactions: 0 Longest transaction: 5.58 Shortest transaction: 0.52
Some insights on what small and simple performance tasks can do for your website. To speed things up more we can use Varnish to fron several midgard enabled backends to spread the load.