[Setup] Re: Varnish cache does not appear to speed up page delivery

[Martin Aspeli]

JimL wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've installed Plone on a test machine (2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4, 1GB RAM -
> running CentOS 5.2) and have done some rough benchmarking with Apache
> Benchmark:
> 
> With CacheFu set up my site is performing very well: 32 requests per second.
> 
> After installing Varnish via 
> http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/buildout/a-deployment-configuration
> the standard buildout method  the corresponding results for pages delivered
> via Varnish are: 30 requests per second. 
> 
> I have set Varnish to round-robin the two backends created by a default
> Plone install (ports 8080 and 8081).
> 
> Am I expecting Varnish to work too fast? Should I consider dropping Varnish
> completely and just using something like pound to sit in front of my two
> backends?

Try to run varnishstat and look for cache hits and misses. It's possible 
that you've got your setup messed up. If you're testing, try to test as 
anonymous first.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book