http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix Random thoughts of a cubicular denizen at the OSU Open Source Lab Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:37:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've received some requests for a copy of my Varnish config. I'll post it here with the following caveats: This is very much a work in progress. There may be some show-stopping bugs that could really mess up your users. Your milage may vary. Use with caution. I ... http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2010/01/23/varnish-config-defaultvcl/ Yesterday I took the plunge and installed Josh Koenig's Varnish module on two of my larger production sites. So far, I'm very happy. It's worked well. More importantly, it's allowed me to greatly increase the max cache lifetime (and therefore cache hit rate) on the site, reducing ... http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2010/01/20/varnish-drupal-module-first-impressions/ Ah, the beauty of hindsight. Things are so clear. Last night I was working on optimizing my Varnish config. My cache hit rates have been lower than I wanted, so I was going through some of the examples on the Varnish wiki - especially this one. Here's what ... http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2009/12/17/varnish-lookup-at-the-end-of-vcl_recv/ A big thanks to David Strauss for pointing me in the right direction in tracing my cache config issues and for putting up with my bonehead errors. I've learned a couple of important things: "Page cache maximum age: none" is not "cache forever". Hindsight being 20:20, it's obvious to ... http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2009/11/23/followup-on-pressflow-61464-and-authcache/ I've been playing with the Authcache module the past couple of days. So far I'm very impressed. I ran some Funkload tests with 1, 25, 50, and 100 concurrent clients to see how it does. Pressflow 6.14.64 with external cache enabled: http://staff.osuosl.org/~gchaix/test_simple-20091121T191202/#request-stats Pressflow 6.14.64 with core cache replaced with Authcache: http://staff.osuosl.org/~gchaix/test_simple-20091121T025003/#request-stats Quite a ... http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2009/11/21/pressflow-61464-and-authcache/ I've been trying to figure out the effect of this line in my Varnish config: sub vcl_hash { if (req.http.Cookie) { set req.hash += req.http.Cookie; } } It seemed to make sense, but I was having a hard time wrapping my head around its ramifications. I was looking at some of ... http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2009/10/14/vcl_hash/ At DrupalCamp PDX this weekend, I was fortunate enough to have some very interesting (if tantalizingly-brief) discussions with Josh Koenig (joshk), Sam Boyer (sdboyer) and Damien Tournoud around sharing configs and best practices for scaling Drupal sites, especially using Varnish and Pressflow. OK. We've talked about it. ... http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2009/10/13/high-performance-varnishpressflowdrupal-community-of-practice/ It all started with an itch. It was a really painful itch that involved a Drupal site that was essentially down due to load. I scratched it with the help of a few incredibly helpful blog posts I found, so now it's my turn to add to them ... http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2009/10/12/pressflow-varnish-and-caching/ Get your Google Summer of Code proposal in now! They're due by noon tomorrow. Don't miss out on your chance to get paid to work on open source software for the summer! http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2009/04/01/24-hours-to-go/ It's that time of year again! Google has renewed the Summer of Code program for 2009. Google is going to pay students $4,500 to work on some of the coolest open source projects in the world. The OSU OSL has been accepted as a mentoring organization again for 2009. ... http://blogs.osuosl.org/gchaix/2009/03/24/google-summer-of-code-2009/