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Anybody with a VPS using Varnish on their server?

by Myles Sinclair
10 replies
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Hello guys,

I've got a VPS and am thinking of installing Varnish to speed up my websites. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who already has this enabled on their server, and how it is working out for you?

Particularly keen to hear if you are using this with WooCommerce sites?
#server #varnish #vps
  • Profile picture of the author malonewolf
    I'm using Varnish, it it helps a lot. There are also a host of other things you can do, such as add memcache, static page generation, and several other tricks. Do you know what your Google PageSpeed is?
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    • Profile picture of the author Myles Sinclair
      Originally Posted by malonewolf View Post

      I'm using Varnish, it it helps a lot. There are also a host of other things you can do, such as add memcache, static page generation, and several other tricks. Do you know what your Google PageSpeed is?
      Hi,

      Thanks for the feedback. I have been looking at Google PageSpeed Insights as it gives useful information. It doesn't seem to show page load time though? So for that I've been using Pingdom and Gtmetrix. Also good tools for page info.

      My results vary quite a bit from one tool to another. Pingdom shows load times on my static sites ranging from 349ms to 526ms. Whereas Gtmetrix shows the same sites ranging from 1.1s to 1.7s. I'm leaning more towards Gtmetrix for accuracy in this.

      My Wordpress sites tested with Gtmetrix range from 1.3 to 2.1.

      With the exception of my current development site which is the slowest, I've enabled gZip compression, browser caching, and installed cache plugins. It's certainly made the sites faster, but I've been researching what I can do in respect of the server.

      Varnish and OPcache keep getting mentioned and varnish in particular looks very promising!

      How does Varnish cope in regards to sites being updated though, with new content or images being changed? Is the Varnish cache automatically refreshed after a set interval?
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      • Profile picture of the author malonewolf
        What are you optimizing for? If it's for SEO, ~.5s for static pages and ~1.5 for more complex pages is going to be plenty fast to get you ranked. If you're perfecting customer experience, I would say that you've already done the 20% that's going to get you 80% there. IMO, I would start looking at other aspects of your site.

        I admit I don't know the ins and outs of Varnish's eviction policy, as I use it on my Wordpress-based sites/stores only and the plugin does a fine job.
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        • Profile picture of the author Myles Sinclair
          Originally Posted by malonewolf View Post

          What are you optimizing for? If it's for SEO, ~.5s for static pages and ~1.5 for more complex pages is going to be plenty fast to get you ranked. If you're perfecting customer experience, I would say that you've already done the 20% that's going to get you 80% there. IMO, I would start looking at other aspects of your site.

          I admit I don't know the ins and outs of Varnish's eviction policy, as I use it on my Wordpress-based sites/stores only and the plugin does a fine job.
          I'm not really bothered about SEO. My main objective is user experience. I agree my speeds are pretty decent, but my concern is that most of my sites are now built with Wordpress. I'm switching to using WooCommerce for my shopping cart, but I'm not sure how it will cope when traffic is high. Most of the time it will be fairly light, but whenever I do an email boadcast, the database will come under pressure. It looks like implementing Varnish should help with that.

          Do you still use a Wordpress Cache plugin with your setup of Varnish?
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          • Profile picture of the author malonewolf
            Yes I use the Wordpress cache plugin.

            What are the expected usage patterns for your site when you expect to get this traffic? Also, what is "high traffic"? A small server and database will be able to handle a over 100 hits/sec unless you're doing something really wrong.

            I would spend some money and buy cheap traffic using adwords and send it to your site and see what happens. Your landing page will get hit a ton and you won't have many buyers, but it will give you some data.
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            • Profile picture of the author Myles Sinclair
              Originally Posted by malonewolf View Post

              Yes I use the Wordpress cache plugin.

              What are the expected usage patterns for your site when you expect to get this traffic? Also, what is "high traffic"? A small server and database will be able to handle a over 100 hits/sec unless you're doing something really wrong.

              I would spend some money and buy cheap traffic using adwords and send it to your site and see what happens. Your landing page will get hit a ton and you won't have many buyers, but it will give you some data.
              Good idea about testing with cheap traffic! The database is probably considered fairly small with about 100 products. I suppose "high traffic" is a relative term. For me it could mean 200, maybe slightly more people browsing the shopping pages at the same time. When it comes to the server side of things I have no idea what they can handle. My knowledge is more about the front end. My VPS specs are 4 Cores CPU 4GB DDRIII ECC RAM 100GB SAS RAID 10 HDD.
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              • Profile picture of the author malonewolf
                You should be fine right now, but as always, test test test!
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  • Profile picture of the author Myles Sinclair
    Will do. Thanks for the chat and feedback.
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  • Profile picture of the author dilipsam
    Try Redis as well!
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  • Profile picture of the author webgeek247
    You can use xVarnish or Cachewall. Better off testing speed in the browser using Google Network tool than the free website page speed tools which aren't as accurate.
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