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

Martin Aspeli optilude+lists at gmail.com
Wed Mar 4 13:12:54 UTC 2009


Martin Aspeli wrote:
> 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.

Bear in mind that ab is not the most accurate load testing tool. For 
instance, you'll get a lot of benefit from Varnish caching static 
resources for you, which ab is not downloading.

Cheers,
Martin

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




More information about the Setup mailing list