# Sensible Performance/Growth Strategies? **URL:** \ **Category:** NGINX\ **Created:** [August 4, 2010, 7:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739 "2010-08-04T19:34:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2010, 7:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/1 "2010-08-04T19:34:16Z")
I’m looking for advice on how to get the most out of my servers, and am looking for information on the advantages/disadvantages of various strategies. Right now, I have a production (ve) from Media Temple with 1GB and a development (ve) with 512MB. I’m running one installation of Magento, and get between 100-300 visitors per day. My traffic is directly proportional to the number of products in my catalog, so I know that as I add more products I will receive more traffic. Obviously, it’s a humble little operation right now. Last spring, I naively set up Apache with APC Cache and Varnish, not realizing that it wouldn’t support SSL without further intervention. Since Nginx can support SSL with or without Varnish, and since it has such a great reputation for performance, I made the switch. On the production server, I just have Nginx running by itself right now while I work out a better system. I installed APC on the dev server this morning, which seems to be helping with PHP memory consumption. I intend to install Varnish as well, and should attempt to optimize MySQL, but thought I’d consult the community before proceeding since I’m not completely confident in the path I’m on. I don’t really know how to weigh the pros and cons of creating a more complicated system vs. paying for a more powerful server. Nor do I understand at what point I should start considering memcached, load balancing, etc. There are likely more appropriate steps between where I’m at now and those solutions, but I’d love to have a plan of action established for the future. Any thoughts? Any resources where I can further educate myself? Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 1:54am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/2 "2010-08-05T01:54:13Z")
I would say you can run Magento with APC, php-fpm and easily server a few hundred visitors per day on 512mb on a Debian/Ubuntu/FreeBsd build. I have a set up on the same spec and Magento can serve fresh pages in less than a second (which is still very slow for a cms but much faster for Magento on Apache etc). You should be able to serve a few thousand page views a day comfortably on a set up like this. You can use Nginx FastCgi Cache instead of Varnish. I haven’t tried Memcached with Magento. ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 5:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/3 "2010-08-05T17:10:24Z")
Ok. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I will look into Nginx FastCgi. How does it compare with Varnish? What tools do you use for stress testing/performance measurements? Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 5:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/4 "2010-08-05T17:41:26Z")
On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 10:08:54AM -0500, Raina G. wrote: > Ok. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I will look into Nginx FastCgi. nginx supports caching for both proxied and FastCGI servers. You may use this scheme: ``` nginx/cache -> Apache/APC ``` > How does it compare with Varnish? > > What tools do you use for stress testing/performance measurements? I did not run tests. > > > Right now, I have a production (ve) from Media Temple with 1GB and a > > > > > > balancing, etc. There are likely more appropriate steps between where > > > > * * * > > > > nginx mailing list > > [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) > > [mailman.nginx.org archive](http://nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx) > > * * * > > nginx mailing list > [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) > [mailman.nginx.org archive](http://nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx) – Igor S. > **[Igor Sysoev](http://sysoev.ru/en/)** ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 6:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/5 "2010-08-05T18:37:40Z")
On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 12:24:23PM -0400, Alex S. wrote: > web-performance world. > > Small site / big site, audience location, content sizes, numbers of > linked static files, etc etc etc, hardware bottleneck, operating system, > network connectivity, redundancy & failover needs, everything is very > much different for every project. > > For average small site (let’s say 10000 pageviews/day) differences > between Varnish and nginx will be almost identical. Remember that > Varnish created to keep as much stuff in memory as possible, and nginx > is based on OS internal things to provide performance. Varnish relies on OS internals too: it mmap()s a huge file that may be larger tens times physical memory and perfomance relies on how OS flushes modified pages to a disk and how then OS reads them back to memory. > I’m not sure about internals of each project and how they work under > Linux vs FreeBSD servers. This could be a decision reason too. Both Varnish and nginx are developed on FreeBSD. – Igor S. > **[Igor Sysoev](http://sysoev.ru/en/)** ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 6:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/6 "2010-08-05T18:25:22Z")
On Thu, 2010-08-05 at 19:40 +0400, Igor S. wrote: > On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 10:08:54AM -0500, Raina G. wrote: > > > How does it compare with Varnish? > > What tools do you use for stress testing/performance measurements? > > I did not run tests. Raina, my 2 cents below… It depends on your application and needs. There is no magic bullet in web-performance world. Small site / big site, audience location, content sizes, numbers of linked static files, etc etc etc, hardware bottleneck, operating system, network connectivity, redundancy & failover needs, everything is very much different for every project. For average small site (let’s say 10000 pageviews/day) differences between Varnish and nginx will be almost identical. Remember that Varnish created to keep as much stuff in memory as possible, and nginx is based on OS internal things to provide performance. I’m not sure about internals of each project and how they work under Linux vs FreeBSD servers. This could be a decision reason too. Don’t forget about backend and application optimization too. There is usually lots of improvements too. If you want to reach peaks of performance you should probably consider benchmarks on every workflow that your users go through and see how fast your backend code is. Alex. ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 7:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/7 "2010-08-05T19:42:06Z")
Thanks everyone for the replies. A few notes to address the comments: 1. I’m using Magento. I am willing to use plugins/extensions, and will apply local overrides/customizations, but don’t want to alter the code base to the point of having difficulties with upgrading, etc. 2. I tried using Amazon S3 as a cheap CDN, but Varnish was WAY faster. 3. I was using Varnish with Apache, and noticed an impressive performance boost. It wasn’t compatible with SSL, so I abandoned it in favor of Nginx. 4. Another Magento community member had provided instructions on configuring Varnish for use with the combination of static and dynamic content that Magento relies on. I’m guessing that this will be a consideration with Nginx FastCgi Cache as well. So, I’ll have to sort that out. 5. I just launched the site on Nginx on July 12 with the minimum configuration for the site to work with the extended SSL cert that I’d purchased. 6. I’m on CentOS. I really need to gain a better understanding of the basics of how everything works. My background is in fine art–not tech. I’ve used [Lynda.com](http://Lynda.com) and Sitepoint to learn about front-end development. Beyond this mailing list, blogs and general googling, I’m not sure what the best resources are for me to become self-taught and establish a true understanding of server management. If anyone can make suggestions about what I should read or watch, I’m all ears. Thanks again for joining the conversation. ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 6:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/8 "2010-08-05T18:55:50Z")
On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 06:49:21PM +0200, [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > Both Varnish and nginx are developed on FreeBSD. > > Recently, we did a test with serving just static files (from a FreeBSD8.1 > VM), a very small data-set. > nginx0.7 was 1.8 times faster than varnish (both mostly untuned). > So, I’d say that OOTB, just serving static files, nginx wins. > Though, I still think that varnish has a place and there are probably > certain situations where it can beat and will nginx. What have you set behind Varnish ? – Igor S. > **[Igor Sysoev](http://sysoev.ru/en/)** ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 8:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/9 "2010-08-05T20:45:56Z")
Am 05.08.2010 um 18:55 schrieb Igor S.: > > > > I’m not sure about internals of each project and how they work > > > > Though, I still think that varnish has a place and there are probably > > > > certain situations where it can beat and will nginx. > > What have you set behind Varnish ? Apache-worker-mpm + php (though not used, as everything is static). IIRC, I first had no expire-headers on the apache-side and the difference was even larger. nginx is _very_ impressive. Rainer ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 8:52pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/10 "2010-08-05T20:52:57Z")
On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 08:44:46PM +0200, Rainer D. wrote: > > > > how OS flushes modified pages to a disk and how then OS reads them > > > > VM), a very small data-set. > > IIRC, I first had no expire-headers on the apache-side and the > difference was even larger. > > nginx is _very_ impressive. It’s strange, I can not believe that Varnish may be almost two times slower on cached responses than nginx on static. – Igor S. > **[Igor Sysoev](http://sysoev.ru/en/)** ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 8:56pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/11 "2010-08-05T20:56:28Z")
On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 10:41 AM, Raina G. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > 1. I’m using Magento. I am willing to use plugins/extensions, and will > apply local overrides/customizations, but don’t want to alter the code > base to the point of having difficulties with upgrading, etc. That’s my policy - never alter the core. Always extend with plugins/modules/whatever. OO-based products are probably much easier to extend as well. So A+ there. > 1. I tried using Amazon S3 as a cheap CDN, but Varnish was WAY faster. a properly working CDN should offload your traffic from the origin - it shouldn’t be considered a performance-tuning cache, it’s more for delivering content better to different geographies and saving origin resources for the dynamic processing, things of that nature. local stuff will probably feel faster almost always unless there is a lot of load 🙂 > I really need to gain a better understanding of the basics of how > everything works. My background is in fine art–not tech. I’ve used > [Lynda.com](http://Lynda.com) and Sitepoint to learn about front-end development. Beyond > this mailing list, blogs and general googling, I’m not sure what the > best resources are for me to become self-taught and establish a true > understanding of server management. If anyone can make suggestions > about what I should read or watch, I’m all ears. You’ve done quite an impressive job of picking this stuff up from that background 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 6:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/12 "2010-08-05T18:49:59Z")
> On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 12:24:23PM -0400, Alex S. wrote: > varnish relies on OS internals too: it mmap()s a huge file that > may be larger tens times physical memory and perfomance relies on > how OS flushes modified pages to a disk and how then OS reads them > back to memory. > > > I’m not sure about internals of each project and how they work under > > Linux vs FreeBSD servers. This could be a decision reason too. > > Both Varnish and nginx are developed on FreeBSD. Recently, we did a test with serving just static files (from a FreeBSD8.1 VM), a very small data-set. nginx0.7 was 1.8 times faster than varnish (both mostly untuned). So, I’d say that OOTB, just serving static files, nginx wins. Though, I still think that varnish has a place and there are probably certain situations where it can beat and will nginx. Rainer ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2010, 9:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/13 "2010-08-05T21:07:35Z")
Am 05.08.2010 um 20:52 schrieb Igor S.: > It’s strange, I can not believe that Varnish may be almost two times > slower on cached responses than nginx on static. I have very little experience with varnish - so I may have done something wrong. Regards, Rainer ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2010, 3:16am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/14 "2010-08-06T03:16:24Z")
I would say in the long run you’re much better off using one of Debian/Ubuntu/FreeBsd. CentOs uses extra memory which could be used for MySql query cache or php APC. More MySql query cache makes a big difference to Magento. ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2010, 4:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/15 "2010-08-06T04:35:27Z")
On 08/06/2010 03:15 AM, Hone W. wrote: > I would say in the long run you’re much better off using one of > Debian/Ubuntu/FreeBsd. > > CentOs uses extra memory which could be used for MySql query cache or php APC. How exactly does Centos “use extra memory” compared to other Distributions or OS’s? Regards, Dennis ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2010, 7:32am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/16 "2010-08-06T07:32:47Z")
Best performance you can get is off FreeBSD, just my personal opinion. ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2010, 5:47am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/17 "2010-08-06T05:47:25Z")
CentOS comes with more base packages and services on by default which causes extra unnecessary memory consumption. Usually around double the memory of a base Debian system. Of course you can go about turning the packages/services off in CentOS but to me its easier just to install the base of a different system and begin from there. ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2010, 6:19am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/18 "2010-08-07T06:19:03Z")
On Friday, August 6, 2010, [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Best performance you can get is off FreeBSD, just my personal opinion. You’ll probably find more people who swear linux is faster in their opinion. Opinions shouldn’t enter into it. The first rule of load testing & tuning is that all changes you make must be fact-based. 1. record actual traffic patterns with your application, to get relative proportions 2. develop test scripts which mimic those proportions as closely as possible. Use JMeter or whatever. Apachebench doesn’t cut it. 3. run controlled tests using your scripts to increase the user load in slow steps 4. monitor systems, looking for bottlenecks 5. vary as few parameters as possible to address bottlenecks, then repeat tests. One of those parameters could be Linux vs freebsd, but I’ll wager the OS won’t matter much. The bottleneck is usually in your dynamic pages or database. – RPM ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2010, 3:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/19 "2010-08-16T15:01:40Z")
Hi, Raina G. a écrit : > 1. I tried using Amazon S3 as a cheap CDN, but Varnish was WAY faster. Of course a local server will be way faster than S3/Cloudfront, but the results will likely be different for a user on the other side of the planet because Cloudfront will have a server close to that user. BTW, you should use cloudfront instead of S3 if you want a CDN: > **[CDN Cloud Service - Amazon CloudFront - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/)** > > Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that helps you distribute your static and dynamic content quickly and reliably with high speed performance, security, and developer ease-of-use. > I really need to gain a better understanding of the basics of how > everything works. My background is in fine art–not tech. > You might want to check these slides from a presentation by Ask Bjørn > Hansen about scaling web services. It helped give me a good overall > understanding of web scalability: [http://develooper.com/talks/rww-mysql-2008.pdf](http://develooper.com/talks/rww-mysql-2008.pdf) (189 pages, 6MB PDF) Cheers, GFK’s ---
**Author:** ![Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/b487fb/32.png) [@Raina\_G](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Raina_G)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2010, 8:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739/20 "2010-08-16T20:55:20Z")
On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Raina G. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > To date, I’ve been needing to manually re-start PHP-FPM about every > other day due to steadily increasing memory consumption over time. I’m > thinking about implementing a script to auto-restart it upon reaching > a certain threshold. I’m wondering if this is a ridiculously lazy > solution, or a reasonably respectable one. what’s your pm.max\_requests set to? it’s the normal way to recycle PHP engines after N number of requests in an attempt to avoid memory leakage over time. what are you looking at to show/detect memory consumption? top? ps? free? note that over time more “free” memory gets thrown into the “cached” bucket, and that memory is able to be reused, the kernel just doesn’t mark it as free (at least on Linux, and I believe I summarized it right) [Next page](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sensible-performance-growth-strategies/192739.md?page=2)