PHP & Caching an in Depth Review - Follow Up Using Varnish

Ok, so following up on PHP & Caching with Varnish, let’s cut to the hard facts shall we?

Using the same tests as

ab -c 100 -n 500 -g ./saiweb-nocache-nogzip.bpl https://blog.oneiroi.co.uk/ This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $> Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, https://www.zeustech.net/ Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, https://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking blog.oneiroi.co.uk (be patient) Completed 100 requests Completed 200 requests Completed 300 requests Completed 400 requests Completed 500 requests Finished 500 requests

Server Software: Apache Server Hostname: blog.oneiroi.co.uk Server Port: 80

Document Path: / Document Length: 92719 bytes

Concurrency Level: 100 Time taken for tests: 0.184 seconds Complete requests: 500 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 47597095 bytes HTML transferred: 47379409 bytes Requests per second: 2716.92 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 36.806 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.368 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 252573.13 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)

          min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

Connect: 1 4 1.1 4 6 Processing: 9 31 7.0 32 47 Waiting: 2 7 5.7 4 26 Total: 15 35 6.8 36 53

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 36 66% 38 75% 39 80% 39 90% 41 95% 44 98% 48 99% 51 100% 53 (longest request)

ab -c 100 -n 500 -g ./saiweb-nocache-nogzip.bpl https://blog.oneiroi.co.uk/

2716.92 requests per second with a server load average of 0.1, and in this case varnish is serving cache from disk.

Caching using varnish (Or even nginx / mod_cache) means that PHP does not get executed at all, the cache system grabs the cache content and serves it.

This of course has the benefit of reducing the CPU and memory resources needed for the running of your application, but it does have some caveats.

  • This only works for GET requests, and content not reliant on Cookies (Truely dynamic content will not cache)
  • But on the “flipside” Varnish supports ESI, which when setup correctly you can target the dynamic sections of a pag for “passthrough” and have the rest cached
      • More details to come, as I have time to add them I have have a lot of posts to make on boxgrinder, KVM, libvirtd etc.

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