This is mighty big for the folks that have been asking for this feature. This is one of the most important releases of the cPanel Varnish Plugin (if not THE most important). One of the features that’s been introduced is colossal and has positive impact on your server. If you have users to cater to or have a cPanel shared server, this is the one addition you’re looking for. Here’s a brief visual walk through.

 

Your end users are now able to:

1) Fine-tune caching of their own domain or subdomain (dynamic and/or static TTL)

2) Immediate purge of their domain data from the Varnish cache. Purge is granular down to the subdomain

3) Disable caching per sub(domain)

 

The other not -so-subtle feature or improvement that went in is that now when you make a VCL change, Varnish isn’t restarted at all. The new VCL is loaded silently preserving whatever hot-cache Varnish holds. This means no more waiting for the cache to rebuild or losing on those precious CPU cycles.

The installation file is available for download. You can order a paid license (to help us continue development) and get the software immediately. If you’re a Magento store owner and need sub-second Magento page loads then look no further! We have developed the most cost-effective and efficient Magento stack in the market! Yes it’s based on Varnish and Magento ESI for the fastest page load there anywhere! Read more about our managed magento varnish server

 

Enjoy!

We’re pleased to announce the release of the DirectAdmin Varnish Plugin version 1.6.0b. The new release sports the following:

1) Varnish 3.0.3

2) DirectAdmin UI / GUI to manage Varnish

3) Major performance improvements by upgrading Varnish and doing less static file versionning

4) Improved Varnish static parameters

5) Numerous bug fixes

Enjoy!

Apache / PHP code compilation represents the majority of the time it takes to complete a build in an EasyApache run on a server. Unfortunately even with the increase in the number of cores per server the time it takes to complete a build still hasn’t improved much. The reason being cPanel doesn’t take advantage of the extra CPU cores that you may have on your server. The cPanel folks are very nice and very helpful but as an ISV they must prioritize feature requests (understandably). So one would need to submit a feature request to cPanel for upvoting.

But I didn’t write all of this to leave it at that. There’s a fix! Albeit not so much of a clean fix but at least you’ll spend less time staring at the build screen during those late Saturday night maintenance windows. So let’s get into the meat of the post. Make, the tool that spawns gcc/cc instances to compile code, gives us the option to specify the number of cc tasks it can spawn at once in parallel to compile code. By default, a maximum of two tasks are spawned in a cPanel build. It means your server will compile at most two files at once out of thousands of source code files between PHP, Apache, and other modules. This inefficiency leads to the The option that we feed to the make tool is the flag -j follow by a number like make -j2. If you have a server with 8 cores, a flag of 0f -j10 will speed up the build dramatically.

But why 10 and not 8? The hypothetical server has 8 cores not 10. The answer is we want to make sure all 8 cores are kept busy at all times including when a core is waiting on an IO job to complete. So why not give the CPU some non-IO bound task to do while the other one is pending? Alright here are the steps you need to follow to take advantage of the multi core compiling goodness:

1) Open file /var/cpanel/perl/easy/Cpanel/Easy/Utils.pm with your favorite editor (vi, pico, or nano, etc)

2) Search for the string: j2. It should be close to line 1711

3) Replace j2 with jX where X is a number representing the number of cores your server has plus 2. Ex: for an 8 core server, X is 10 or j10

4) Save and close the file then run: chattr +i /var/cpanel/perl/easy/Cpanel/Easy/Utils.pm

5) Rebuild Apache/PHP (usually using /scripts/easyapache –build &> /tmp/build.out &)

6) Watch the build complete in record time! Tail /tmp/build.log to follow progress

7) Once the build completes, restore the immutable attribute to its original setting: chattr -i /var/cpanel/perl/easy/Cpanel/Easy/Utils.pm

8) You’re done

That’s all folks. We hope you enjoyed this one!

Cheers

 

Spamhaus has been the target of a DDoS attack, which has been reported to be the largest ever recorded in the history of the Internet at 300Gbps. Very few data centers have the aggregate network/carrier capacity of 300Gbps. But a 300Gbps DDoS attack is sure to put a nail in the coffin for any provider. In fact, it’s such a massive attack that it caused congestion for all Internet traffic. We’ve published an article on a novel and affordable way to mitigate a small scale DDoS using readily available open source tools like Nginx and Varnish using VPS nodes or dedicated servers.

Be sure to read the article since it explains the where, why, what, and who of DDoS!

1.6.2-elX is an important update release (though not critical). Starting form WHM 11.36, cPanel has transitioned to using its own perl interpreter (not /usr/bin/perl). So if you’re on 11.36 and up and don’t have Net::LibIDN, you’re going to lose Varnish WHM functionality on your server.

Here are the changes in 1.6.2:

1) Upgrade Varnish to latest 3.0.3
2) Improve PNG caching
3) Add support for httpd 2.4
4) Fix ModSec X-Forwarded-For in VCL
5) Fix cli timeouts when server is under disk IO load
6) Fix shebang to cPanel’s perl
7) Fix purge logic
8) Phase one of end user functionality support
9) Phase one of scripts store support

Oh and we have a 50% for life coupon for all VPS orders in Atlanta (new DC)! Coupon: ATL50%OFF (limited quantity). The plugin comes free with your VPS (and much more).

You might also be interested in these two other plugins:

cPanel Varnish Litespeed Plugin

cPanel Varnish Nginx Plugin

Enjoy!

Managed server

We’re pleased to announce the release of the Varnish Litespeed plugin for cPanel WHM. This comes almost two years after the release of our cPanel Varnish Plugin and several months after the release of our Varnish Nginx Plugin. There are so many points to discuss and so much to cover with this release.

More to come soon!

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