Hello Jackson,

Nice! You might want to give it a try and put your review here for others to see. Or anyone here has been using this in your site, you are welcomed to share your experience here.

Yes, I have been using the Varnish 4.0 cache for a while. I had to custom write the VCL but it works great

Thanks for the heads up on this Matthew

Yes, I have been using the Varnish 4.0 cache for a while. I had to custom write the VCL but it works great

Hi Matthew,

Nice! I just installed Varnish 4.02 + Nginx + php-fpm on OS X and I'm impressed with the speed. The response time with EasySocial is pretty cool but I'm looking at default install and local though. Nevertheless, I am getting less than a second on load time in any of ES pages. Might be worth the time to play around with it.

Matthew, would you care to share your VCL for the community?

I'll create a new server after the Holidays and will test how nginx + varnish performs on live server, will post back later.

Thanks,

Jackson

Thanks for sharing this Jackson

LAC Infosys wrote:

Yes, I have been using the Varnish 4.0 cache for a while. I had to custom write the VCL but it works great

Hi Matthew,

Nice! I just installed Varnish 4.02 + Nginx + php-fpm on OS X and I'm impressed with the speed. The response time with EasySocial is pretty cool but I'm looking at default install and local though. Nevertheless, I am getting less than a second on load time in any of ES pages. Might be worth the time to play around with it.

Matthew, would you care to share your VCL for the community?

I'll create a new server after the Holidays and will test how nginx + varnish performs on live server, will post back later.

Thanks,

Jackson

Hi Jackson,

I could share the VCL but to be honest it is very specific to my set-up which is why I have not done so as yet. I have also had to modify the core of Joomla and change the way Joomla handles session cookies to get everything to play nicely. This is a pain as I have to implement this modification every time Joomla is upgraded.

I mainly find that Varnish is great for keeping the server stable and quick under heavy peak demand. Saying this it is important to optimize your set-up so it is nice and quick before implementing Varnish. My system is highly tuned as we experience heavy traffic and have now up to 100 members logged in at anytime with usually 5,000 or so visitors all demanding page views!

I could help you set your server up with Varnish, I am not sure what your development or coding skill set is like?

Matt.

Hello Matt,

Just wondering, what is your current server specifications? Are you on VPS or do you ride on a dedicated server?

Hey Mark, I currently use a fully dedicated server (the only way to go for professional websites!) just running one website based on easysocial:

Server specs at present:

Xeon E3-1270 v3 (4 Cores x 3.5 GHz)
16 GB DDR3
2 x 120 GB SSD

Hi Matt,

Yes, I guess with Joomla using Varnish will not be a straight forward implementation. So far, with my research I come across this paid how to:

http://massivescale.net/varnish-joomla.html

and FREE one from creator of JoomlaWorks/K2:

https://snipt.net/fevangelou/the-perfect-varnish-configuration-for-joomla-websites/

I have not tried both yet but I will soon.

I could help you set your server up with Varnish, I am not sure what your development or coding skill set is like?

I appreciate the offer Matt and will surely contact you when I'm done deploying a new Web Server. How do I contact you by the way

Any suggestion with Server RAM/CPU/HDD Size/swap configuration? I am trying to setup and anticipate a high traffic website as well in preparation for introducing ES features. Currently our website average load time is 8-9s or more with ES pages and I don't think that's acceptable.

We're using VPS by the way. Any performance comment on using VPS vs Dedicated servers?

Thanks,

Jackson

Thanks for the heads up on this Matthew

I don't understand why some people like to use Varnish with Nginx. Nginx already does a very good job serving static files. It makes sense when you use varnish with Apache, but I don't see the big use of vanish on Nginx where nginx by design is able to serve thousands of request, serve static contents in a flash, able to cache static files, and also able to handle heavy loads. Whatever minor benefit varnish might bring to nginx set up, I feel adding an extra layer is just a headache when it comes to maintaining and troubleshooting. I prefer the KISS principle for this. This is just my view at it..

I believe Varnish should be able to help decrease the delivery time but probably not a significant improvement over Nginx. Well, I guess it's just a matter of preference

For instance, I prefer Apache over Nginx I feel that apache obeys me more compared to nginx

First, to clarify: Nginx is a web server, with all of the features and complexity that entails. It also has a caching capability, but that is not it's primary design goal.

Varnish is not a web server. It cannot fill that role (not without a truly evil VCL, anyway!). It's role is to cache content provided by another server. If needed, it can even alter the request or the response.

If nginx can handle your traffic, then great, it is enough. If nginx is sometimes not able to keep up (as in our case), then one way to increase its capacity is by placing a cache in front of it and having the cache handle as many of the requests as possible. Which in our case is Varnish.

Varnish also has the capability of serving static files on average 5% faster than nginx. We mainly use it to serve up already complied PHP pages to our visitors while serving mainly dynamic content to out logged in users.

The true power of Varnish is the configurable VCL which gives you multiple ways to direct and balance your traffic and alter requests/responses on the fly.

Thanks for sharing this Matthew

Hi Matt,

Thanks for sharing, with my further research about nginx, yes, I found out that they added a caching capability to it. So, I guess I would also play around with it.

I prefer Apache too like Mark, but our website is Frankenstein of multiple components from different developers and I can't just drop components to make things load faster so I have to exhaust all our options as to what works with our Frankenwebsite. I have to test how nginx performs with our setup.

@Neel, thanks for your comment, the goal of my question is not about personal preference but to gain knowledge on Nginx/Varnish technology so we know what technology to use that would work with our setup. And maybe, this discussion would also educate other people and give them options. I like KISS principle as well but different setup different preferences

@Mark, like I said I prefer Apache too since I have used it for years and I am familiar with the configuration. Nginx, is new to me, but playing with it for a short time, the config file does look simple to comprehend. And I feel that it obeys me more than Apache

Jackson

Thanks for the sharing guys,
I have a shared hosting plan with siteground, theyr have varnish and memcached,
When i activate the varnish dynamics cache i get some bugs on my website, users see others sessions some times for example. I dont know if its due to varnish or siteground config

Hello Jackson,

You should try to get rid of extensions which you don't use on the site, it would hurt you more on the long run

Hello, i am moving to new litespeed hybrid vps, i have varnish installed as cache and i have some sessions issues, i think that i must set up some VCL or some thing like this. Can any body help me please or share a slution ? thanks !

(i'am testing a new hoster services and seems great, once finished the test i will share the results)

I'm curious about how long folks commonly set the Varnish cache time limit for EasySocial/Joomla? Also is it applied "globally" or only on specific pages? Also is it used across all user types?

If you are going to use Varnish to cache the contents, I believe it would be advisable that the refresh time should be lower than the session expiry's time. This way, before the session would expire (In case it expires), it would get refreshed by Varnish but again, it really defeats the purpose of caching if the data on your site changes too frequently.

LAC Infosys wrote:

Hi Matt,

Thanks for sharing, with my further research about nginx, yes, I found out that they added a caching capability to it. So, I guess I would also play around with it.

I prefer Apache too like Mark, but our website is Frankenstein of multiple components from different developers and I can't just drop components to make things load faster so I have to exhaust all our options as to what works with our Frankenwebsite. I have to test how nginx performs with our setup.

Jackson

My site is Frankenstein of multiple components from different developers like yours,
did you find the best settings for your site ?

Hi Guys,

Thanks for sharing.

Hi Mariosgr,

My site is Frankenstein of multiple components from different developers like yours,
did you find the best settings for your site ?

It is still Frankenstein :P unfortunately but like what Mark mentioned above to uninstall unused components/modules/plugins does helped. We're developing the new version of our site in J3.4.1 and I'm kind of cleaning things up and consolidating contents to minimize the number of components needed.

We're running it using nginx and I choose to create my own Joomla template so I can control what's being loaded. Developing your own template does help a lot in cutting down all those not needed fancy features that comes with most of Joomla Template framework. You can also try to use Stackideas Free template - Wanderers for a start, it's a lightweight template.

So far the load speed is way way much faster than our current site.

Jackson

Frankenstein haha! Frankenstein is cool I agree everything Jackson mentioned above and to sum it all, it also really depends on your server setup.

The problem
This is a real scenario, I had a customer recently needed some help and he was paying close to 950 pounds / year for a dedicated server. All this server hosts, is just a single website and it has cpanel and those craps in it. The cpu usage has been constantly at 150% and he was blaming Joomla / EasySocial for causing the slowdown.

The solution
Got him a nice cloud server at digitalocean which only costs $960 usd a year. Setup my own customized LAMP stack with custom configurations and site is incredibly faster, and load time is constantly at 0.00 The configuration is not extensive, and not even 100% optimized yet. Just a very minor setup

Conclusion
If you don't need cpanel, don't ever think about it. You don't need to waste tons of money on unnecessary dedicated machines. You just need to invest on good server admins to get it setup right for you

AND...... Don't blame Joomla or EasySocial for slowing the site down

Exactly, a custom Lamp stack, decent tuning and a clever cache is all that is needed to make Easy Social fly.

Horse power does indeed help but it also very much about how you put it down on the road. If anyone needs help with setting up a custom stack on a droplet, VPS or dedicated set up let me know. I am a professional server admin and software engineer and love playing around with brand new servers

Yep, Matthew is right