Tag: Varnish

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It works independent of Apache, Nginx, and/or WordPress, thus providing better performance improvement on any WordPress blog.

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WordPress Preloading Posts / Pages / Images – What, when and how!

Preloading posts is one of the popular recommendations by most articles on the internet on how to speed up your WordPress site. Since, most WordPress sites (I’d say over 99%) have little or negligible traffic, it is highly recommended to get the posts preloaded in the cache so that the visitors do not have to wait to get the generated on-the-fly that actually takes some time. In this case, by the time the post is generated to be served to the visitor, the visitors may have gone to visit another website. So, do I recommend preloading? Yes (for low traffic sites) and no (for high traffic sites). Read more for a bit of explanation on this…

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Fix Incorrect IP Address in WP Comments

Image of an IP logoThe cost of running a VPS is becoming cheaper and cheaper. There are more things we could get for the same bucks. Once your site is ready for a VPS, there are multiple server stack options available, than the traditional LAMP setup. For example, you could completely ignore Apache and can use Nginx with php-fpm . Either case, you wouldn’t have any issues related to IPs in comments. However, on a complicated setups, such as Varnish => Nginx => php-fpm or Nginx => Apache, or Varnish => Apache, WordPress doesn’t display the IP address of the visitors correctly. There is nothing wrong with WordPress. It’s all about the implementation. Forwarding the correct client IP can be tricky as the complexity of the server stack increases. There are situations where you just don’t have any options to forward the correct address. Continue reading “Fix Incorrect IP Address in WP Comments”

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W3 Total Cache 1.0? – Sneak Peek!

Banner of W3 Total Cache pluginUpdate (Feb 5, 2013): The beta version that I tested, has been released as version 0.9.2.6 with more features than mentioned below. So, this post is void as of February 5, 2013 (in less than 2 weeks of publishing it). :(-

W3 Total Cache is back in active development, nearly after a year. I’m one of the lucky people who got the opportunity to test the beta version of the upcoming release, probably 1.0.0.0! It brings a few new features, including a more-intuitive troubleshooter. Continue reading “W3 Total Cache 1.0? – Sneak Peek!”

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Varnish 301 Redirect

Varnish logo

Note (as of August 30, 2017): The original post was published for Varnish 3. A lot changed since then. Currently, we have a nicer way to achieve 301 redirects. Thanks!

Varnish logoVarnish is a powerful caching HTTP reverse proxy server. It can sit in front of Apache or Nginx and can cache the requests that are configured to be cached. Varnish offers a lot of flexibility on what to cache and what not to cache. However, it doesn’t offer any simple redirection by default. When it stands in front of a general purpose web server, it sends the requests to the backend (in our case, Nginx), and then sends the backend response to the browser. While this is the natural process, there are a couple of ways to reduce this round-trip and save a bit of time. After all, every millisecond counts! Continue reading “Varnish 301 Redirect”

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Implementation is everything

Image #1 for QA series - Check out more posts tagged as NginxThere was an interesting question in the Nginx mailing list regarding replacing Varnish with Nginx as a load balancer. Let me quote the question directly here…

The question:

We are using Varnish in front of 3 load balanced web servers running apache.  We had migrated from one hosting platform where we had 1 app server and 1 database server using Varnish (Drupal 6.x) and had no issues.  Now that we are running in a load balanced environment (3 load balanced apache web servers, a Varnish server, and 1 database server) we are seeing mulitple examples of cacheing issues. (Pages not displaying correctly… style issues, data input staying cached and used on another page, etc).

We think we can just replace the Varnish server and use a NGinx server.  I don’t want to necessarily remove all the apache servers, but we have to get this cacheing issue corrected….

any thoughts…?

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MySQL Server Crashed – My Site was still online!

MySQL logoYou don’t hear this often… MySQL server crashed and the sites hosted in that server went offline for hours together. But, when a similar thing happened to my VPS, it wasn’t the case. My site was still online, while I was troubleshooting the issue with MySQL server. Ultimately, I could not figure out the issue and I had to purge the entire MySQL installation. However, I was still cool during the entire process. You may ask how. Here is what happened and how you can prevent the same for your own VPS too… Continue reading “MySQL Server Crashed – My Site was still online!”

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Varnish for the masses – Gandi.net Simple Hosting Review

Gandi.net Simple HostingLast month, Gandi.net sent a tweet providing free hosting for a month on their simple hosting package. As I already purchased a domain from them and was already looking for a host, I immediately replied and received the promo code within minutes. I’ve been using their service for about 20 days now. So, here is a quick review on how it went on so far, how it fares comparing to other hosting providers, its advantages over others and its unique disadvantages! Continue reading “Varnish for the masses – Gandi.net Simple Hosting Review”

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W3 Total Cache Alternatives

Cachify Logo for the post entitled W3 Total Cache plugin alternativesThere is no doubt that W3 Total Cache has so many options to optimize any WordPress site than any other caching plugin. Even if you use all the features it offers there are other ways to achieve the same, manually, with better efficiency and better results.

Additionally, if you have used W3 Total Cache plugin for at least a year, especially on a multisite, you’d know that it is not a perfect plugin. As with any other plugin out there, it has its own bugs, does some nasty things, some unsatisfied users, had some security flaws on some hosts and a lot more. What’s more, it is not actively developed as of now. The latest development log shows that it’s been 5 months since the last commit with the number of unanswered questions growing by every day in the WordPress support forums.

Updates:

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