A brief sidetrack: Varnish

Posted on 2 October 2013 in Linux, Programming

In order to use this blog as a decent real-world test of rsp, I figured that I should make it as fast as possible. The quickest way to do that was to install Varnish, which is essentially a reverse proxy that caches stuff. You configure it to say what is cachable, and then it runs in place of the web server and proxies anything it can't cache back to it.

I basically used the instructions from Ewan Leith's excellent "10 Million hits a day with Wordpress using a $15 server" post.

So now, this server has:

I've also got haproxy running on port 82, doing the same as rsp -- proxying everything to varnish -- so that I can do some comparative speed tests once rsp does enough for such tests to give interesting results. Right now, all of the speed differences seem to be in the noise, with a run of ab pointed at varnish actually coming out slower than the two proxies.