Varnish HTTP accelerator

[clivejo]

I have Varnish on an Enterprise Plan and wanted to see if it would speed up access to a Wordpress site.

I have it enabled but I dont know how to configure it or even see if its working. Does anyone know how to use this accelerator? There doesn’t seem to be very detailed instruction in the help section only to enable/disable it!

[doneritehosting]

Hey clivejo,
I haven't played with varnish myself however I am pm-ing you a link that should got through the setup fairly detailed.

[clivejo]

I can find plenty of online guides for how to use it on a server, but I cant work out how it works as part of the shared hosting package. Do I have to modify the DNS of the website I want cached?

[wjleong]

i think you don't have to change anything instead of enable it.

varnish is replace your apache port 80, and act as http cache to cache the request. and apache port change to 8080.

browser still request from port 80, and go through varnish first, then only go to apache.

and varnish cache is very useful for large traffic site, but may be 'harmful' for low traffic site, harmful here mean create unnecessary cpu and memory load.

[clivejo]

I have a database driven site. The pages are dynamically generated, like a mediawiki. But to the average user/guest and search engines the pages could be served static from a cache and only change when a registered user logs on. I was hoping this would speed access up and stop the slow-down when search engines are indexing the site.

[wjleong]

i don't know whether varnish cache can help you, because I tried to set varnish cache on my webmin vps, but configuration seems difficult, so I did not successful set it. and I can't share the performance here.

may be after you tested, share it with us ?

and for wordpress, you can use wpsupercache which is very useful and helpful, you can also choose apc cache in wpsupercache as well as enable memcache in your cp.