We’ve just upgraded our cPanel Varnish plugin from Varnish 2.1.4 to 3.0.0. To kick off the new release I’ve performed a before and after benchmark to get a feel of the performance boost. The results are outstanding! I spun up one VPS, loaded it with our plugin version 1.4.5rc1, and performed a benchmark using ab. Then loaded the same VPS with plugin version 1.4.5rc2 to perform the same benchmark. Keep in mind that these results are relative and that’s what I’m focusing on here.

Here are the VPS specs (typical of medium sized virtual machine):

• 4-core Opteron Magny-Cours (vcpu allocation)
• 1gb ddr3
• thread_pools@2 and thread_pool_min@200
• Custom VCL (same across both experiments)

Here are the results from the first run against 2.1.4 (full ab results):

Concurrency Level:      1600
Time taken for tests:   1.514520 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      3764888 bytes
HTML transferred:       60078 bytes
Requests per second:    6602.75 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       242.323 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.151 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          2427.17 [Kbytes/sec] received

Here are the results from the first run against 3.0.0 (full ab results):

Concurrency Level:      1600
Time taken for tests:   1.371934 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      4001094 bytes
HTML transferred:       60318 bytes
Requests per second:    7288.98 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       219.509 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.137 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          2847.80 [Kbytes/sec] received

It’s important to note that the resources allocated to both experiments are the same and the goal is to stress test 2.1.4 and 3.0.0. Release 3.0.0 is over 600 requests per second or 10% faster than 2.1.4, which is great! Congratulations to the Varnish Cache dev team for job well done :)

That’s all folks!

About UNIXY

UNIXY is a long-time Varnish Cache user and evangelist. They have been offering Varnish acceleration to their clients for more than three years. They have released the first cPanel Varnish plugin as well as spun a new startup,Fastlayer, the on-demand HTTP accelerator for the cloud.

That’s all folks!

phpBB is a open source forum software. The board’s index page lists the topics along with a listing of online members. While trouble shooting a customer report of a slower loading of the board “index” page, we found out that the fix in itself is simple and easy to implement. We would like to share this solution in the hope that it will benefit others. It turns out one of the hot spot table, phpbb_users, is not indexed. The performance fix is to simply add an index on column user_email of only 15 characters. Here is an example of the index creation:

create index phpbb_users_email on phpbb_users (user_email(15));

That should do it. Enjoy the quick performance bump! Keep in mind that UNIXy is a fully managed shop and is always happy to lend a hand with systems questions. This is part of our fully managed services guarantee that comes with our VPS and dedicated servers.

That’s all folks!