A brief sidetrack: Varnish

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:

• rsp running on port 80, proxying everything to port 83.
• varnish running on port 83, caching what it can and proxying the rest to port 81.
• nginx running on port 81, serving static pages and sending PHP stuff to php5-fpm on port 9000.

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.