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Is Varnish worth it if you don't have a lot of traffic?
lukelarris
Member
in General
I run a 512MB droplet from Digital Ocean with nginx, php-fpm with APC, and MariaDB. I've added some caching stuff to my nginx configs for my sites, and they all load very quickly, but I'm wondering if using Varnish will boost things at all.
I don't get a lot of traffic so maybe it's not a good idea, especially since I read nginx is very good by itself with static content, but most of my sites are PHP scripts.
Comments
Varnish + 512MB is not worth it. It will eat all of that and a lot more
What if it was by itself on its own 512MB droplet, and I just routed everything through that droplet?
Why not use Cloudflare?
I dont think there is much benefit with such a small amount of RAM, I've used Varnish extensively for high traffic sites but we are using 32GB machines for Varnish instances.
I did once install Varnish on 4GB machine but it took all the RAM and didn't provide much improvement because it couldn't keep the majority of the assets in RAM.
Because CloudFlare actually slows sites down, unless you're paying for Business or Enterprise.
Good to know, thanks. I didn't realize Varnish would eat up that much RAM. So it's probably not a good idea then.
If you don't have that much traffic, then NGINX's cache should keep things running fine.
Even CloudFlare can be jumpy with latency and transit.
Yeah, just wanted to experiment a bit, but I'd only be shaving off a few milliseconds at this point.
Proof to backup such statement? I've found CF to be excellent.
Proof to backup statement?
Honestly, with Varnish you need to look at it from a different perspective. Does it actively improve performance by an amount that you see valuable?
Yes, Varnish WILL improve performance. Yes, Varnish CAN live on 128MB ram if you tell it to. But with 512 MB ram and a MySQL install, you're pushing it really close to the edge, and you have to ask yourself if it's worth it.
I use varnish on 512mb all the time. Never had a problem. Thing to remember is varnish scales memory usage better with traffic increases than Apache or nginx, at least in my tests, so unless you have an excess of things that can't be cached your upper boundary on usage doesn't go up all that much.
http://www.wpsite.net/what-is-cloudflare-why-you-should-use-cloudflare/
http://www.jimwestergren.com/why-i-recommend-cloudflare-and-why-you-should-try-it-too/
http://inboundexperts.com.au/every-site-world-using-cloudflare/
Just a few
>
http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/12338/cloudflare-slowing-down-response-times
Yeah, I didn't think running it on the droplet my sites are on would be a good idea, but maybe through another droplet.
Good to know!
I have to say that CF has worked for me as well, I just use the CDN Only option for some sites and it has decreased the page loading for about 300%. Using the complete package adds a few ms but its not a big deal.
The most common misuse I see on CF is that some people will get a server from a provider in their own city and the complain that CF increases latency instead of decreasing it. It does not work that way, when you need a wider range of audience from different parts of the world then CF can really help you (and save a lot of bandwidth).
--USEFUL LINK--
https://www.cloudflare.com/network-map
As i read that: http://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515 within some seconds near 1 Million sites turned down because of the issue, for about 1 Hour Cloudfare died for me. And this Threads like aaa Cloudflare makes everything slow just confirmed it.
It's helped him pretend his website is safe from IP discovery.
@Rallias
At no time have I used Cloudflare for any one of the several projects I fund to hide an IP; one being a touchy community forum on computer security. The said forum is hosted with BuyVM.
You told me you'd pay me 2000 doge if I found some method to find your site's real IP. I found the IP, but no doge.
What a load of bollocks, so because 3 websites said so? that's your proof?
GJ
This is not true. Free and Pro sites don't get different treatment relative to speed because they aren't on an Enterprise or Business plan.
Thank you for helping dispel one of the more retarded myths about cloudflare.
Hmm, my website's load very quickly with cloudflare. Not so if I did not. Maybe not general case?
It depends on what you are running basically. I had a custom-coded php site using cakephp where it was just slow for some reason - and neither me nor the developer could find anything obvious.
Load times dropped by up to 75% after getting Varnish to cache the pages (except for the server page where server stats were displayed)
Basically - do tests, see if its worth it to deploy Varnish. Some sites are already optimized to the point where Varnish will just add a 10ms load difference while others will benefit greatly from it.
I found LoadImpact quite useful during testing.
Note: This was done on a openlitespeed + varnish setup with no cloudflare; I found that cloudflare was slower and reduced requests by a marginal amount (via varnishstat) to be considered not useful when the performance decrease and spikes were considered.
Does Varnish help with high server loads?
This depends on what is actually causing the server load itself. Is it your database software? your webserver software? hell, for all we know it could be an email server, lol.
Its a 12GB VPS that has around ~70 sites hosted and recently its reaching high unusual loads.
I use PHP 5.5, MYSQL 5.5, Nginx + php-fpm + a good configuration, with virtualmin on a 512mb CentOS server... it works awesome.. + there is 70-100mb free RAM...