Magento CE Varnish vs Extensions Full Page Cache

[ps2chiper]

Has anyone tried this for Magento Varnish?
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I will test varnish 4.1 now. which module do you suggest I use first for testing? And just exactly how many layers of caching can I pile onto magento?

I tried turpentine before and did not like the level of complexity it required to get it to work with multiple sites. I am becoming a fan of keeping services isolated to individual vps instances. I am also going nuts trying to find a good mail server suite.

More like I want to have some room to experiment. My host offers a shared resource pool that I am going to try out. I see you are using virtualmin, so you are probably using that for your emails. Me I want to use a well rounded email suite with virtual transport support. They are low resource usage, but so far, I was unable to get modoboa or posty to work. That is why I would like to create small instances and hack away until it works.

 

[Gandalf]

@ps2chiper, I did, and it is working like a charm. One one the best Varnish module for Magento. I tested in Varnish3 not sure about Varnish4, however it is supported.

You can use this one, mentioned above, however, as far as I remember, varnish is stop working while customer is logged in, or there is an item in the basket. Для просмотра ссылки Войди или Зарегистрируйся is different, it works all the time, but I had a problem with correct hole punching. Did you try Turpentine so far?

Funny you said that, because I always kept all my website seperate, mainly on dedicated server on each vhost (Plesk and Webmin/Virtualmin) but I was fed up about updating modules x8 etc. I have all website on 1 Magento instance now.... it looks OK so far. What kind of problems you faced? (kipping all in 1 instance?) was that Varnish issue, or something else?

@ps2chiper what .vcl do you use on your websites? Have you ever tried this one?

 

[ps2chiper]

I did not get started yet. I bought a iwzip service from iperweb. The service is still pending for now.

For an update, I could not get varnish 4.1 to startup due to dash on ubuntu. Does anyone have any advice?

Something about cc_command not passing through on dash.

I did some research on it, centos uses bash, and its a dash issue.

yes, i am sure, because it has to do with the cc_command to load openssl. I will post more details, when I am free. I am back now, here is the line that will not work in dash.
-p 'cc_command=exec cc -fpic -shared -Wl,-x -o %o %s -lcrypto -lssl' from Для просмотра ссылки Войди или Зарегистрируйся

root@valuegrab:~# service varnish start
* Starting HTTP accelerator varnish                                     [fail]
Error:
Unknown parameter "'cc_command".
root@valuegrab:~#

 

[Gandalf]

@ps2chiper, what .vcl are you using? and what Magento module for it?

"dash on ubuntu"? what do you mean?

Did you try uninstall Varnish and install it back? This can help, do you have the same problems with eg. CentOS?

OK... are you sure you added the correct distribution?

echo "deb https://repo.varnish-cache.org/ubuntu/ trusty varnish-4.1" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/varnish-cache.list

 

[Rahel Goldstein]

I have tried both modules. The Phoenix Media Module was one of the first Varnish modules available (it has been ~2 years since I tried) and it was working good, but it was necessary to adapt PHTML templates to make it work. About 3 months ago I tried Turpentine, it is more complex and configuration of hole punching can be done in XML. It also supports caching for logged in users, but I had a bug with hole punching for logged in users (which is also confirmed in git issue), so I could not use it - discovered only after several wasted hours of testing :-(

I tested Turpentine with Varnish 4 on CentOS 7 and it was working fine (except the hole punching bug in Turpentine), I remember that some of the syntax changed in Varnish 4 (start up paramteres) so maybe you have to adapt something in your VCL.

 

[ps2chiper]

I moved on to php 7

I had compiled my own nginx so it would support http and pagespeed. So much better than apache.

Gandalf, yes it had a big impact. We have an online chat on our site and previously we always had a couple of requests per day asking if the site is safe to buy. We are in an emerging market and here we have lots of stores which do not ship after payment and up to credit carf fraud. Then we put up the seals (comodo, google safe browsing and some others) and now we have maybe 3 requests per week regarding security. We chose Comodo because all big stores in my market use Comodo or Symantec (too expensive), so people would recognize it.

What country are you in?

I just use webmin to keep it simple. I believe virtualmin paid edition is good for nginx support.

 

[Rahel Goldstein]

I am also using PHP 7 (very good performance and no need to configure), but still, I would like to use Varnish because it so much faster and reduces server load a lot (e.g. when Google and Bing bot hit the site at the same time).

Right Gandalf, that's another thing I forgot to mention. SSL Offloading with nginx server and Varnish adds another layer of complexity, it is easier with Apache though as you can use nginx for SSL connections and there are many tutorials out there how to set it up (but who wants to use Apache nowadays). First, I tried nginx and Pound (ssl terminater, reverse proxy and load balancer) which did not work. Then, after hours of trial and error I got it working using nginx only.

I switched my store to 100% https just last week, no problems so far. Did you know that Amazon offers since January this year free SSL certificates for Cloudfront with custom subdomains? This was my reason to switch over, configuration just took 10 minutes (store and CDN). Before that it was necessary to get a third party SSL certificate for cloudfront and upload to Amazon.

So I would like to get back to Varnish one day, but only if I have a week of time to make thorough tests or maybe I could invest that time as well to port my store to Magento 2

Nginx consumes less memory than Apache in my environment and does not come pre-loaded with many modules which I don't need. Regarding the SSL cert, I did not try Let's encrypt now yet, but it is a great initiative. I stick with comodo so I can show the seal in my site footer (important to build trust in my market, people are very concerned with security ). But if you use Amazon cloudfront for content delivery, you can now create a SSL certificate for cloudfront in seconds using the AWS interface (I think it is only available in North Virginia region though). Up to last year you would need to upload the certificate and configure many things to make it work with cloudfront, now it is a matter of seconds.

Gandalf, yes it had a big impact. We have an online chat on our site and previously we always had a couple of requests per day asking if the site is safe to buy. We are in an emerging market and here we have lots of stores which do not ship after payment and up to credit carf fraud. Then we put up the seals (comodo, google safe browsing and some others) and now we have maybe 3 requests per week regarding security. We chose Comodo because all big stores in my market use Comodo or Symantec (too expensive), so people would recognize it.

I don't know about the requirements for PCI 3.0 compliance, is there a checklist anywhere?

Thanks Gandalf, I checked online at Для просмотра ссылки Войди или Зарегистрируйся and my site passed all tests, however I doubt it really tests everything . Have you already tried http/2?

Not yet, I am still running nginx 1.8.1 which does not support http/2 and I read bug reports that http/2 seems to be slower regarding TTFB than http1.1 in the recent nginx versions, so I decided to wait a little or hear other user experiences before upgrading my server

 

[Gandalf]

Good feedback about Varnish Radel... You know guys I'm thinking about changing Varnish onto Magento FPC, because HTTPS. Did you notice how many whole websites are HTTPS nowadays... All about SEO. Google will promote more HTTPS websites instead http. What do you think? Did you make Varnish work with HTTPS?

Right, I tried make my website working with Pound as well, with no success. All my websites have Let's encrypt now, it's free, so that's fine.
About Apache... I'm using it, there is no speed performance comparing Apache and nginx on Magento. Do you agree with me?

About Magento 2 and Varnish... Indeed it works like a charm, fast and good (in my opinion) after couple of hours of testing. However I'm using bespoke extension, which is no compatible with M2.

Indeed, (...) I didn't use Comodo seal on websites, because many people doesn't know what it is. I have less requests now. Did you noticed huge impact showing people the seal on footer?

Ps2chiper, have you done it with any hosting control panel? I need a panel, cos client needs and easier for manage websites... If yes, what hosting panel you use with Varnish?

Rachel, is your site PCI COMPLIANT? my websites/server proudly are

Ps2chiper, don't need Virtualmin pro to make nginx working, it is working fine on GPL licence. I had a chat with Jamie Cameron once, he said, there are no plans to make Varnish module for Virtualmin he advised me to make one.... No comment... Haha. Ps2chiper/Rachel do you have some tests/benchmark comparing Apache and nginx on Magento? I cannot see any improvements...

There are many online checklists, however try scan your website/server using free scanner, eg. Для просмотра ссылки Войди или Зарегистрируйся

Have you already tried http/2?

No, not yet, only my CDN works with http2 so far. What about you? Have you tried? any improvments with Magento?

 

[b2565826]

Anyone has experience of this FPC??
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[erahul88]

We recently made lot of efforts to enhance the page load of magento 1.9.2.2 HTTP

What really worked for us:
upgrading to latest PHP 7 - 30-40% more faster than PHP 5 for magento
Nginx with page speed - with pagespeed it make noticeable difference
APCu OPcache
Gzip
memcache
varnish - currently have session issues, looking for extension or fix.
many general optimization

Gandalf, yes it had a big impact. We have an online chat on our site and previously we always had a couple of requests per day asking if the site is safe to buy. We are in an emerging market and here we have lots of stores which do not ship after payment and up to credit carf fraud. Then we put up the seals (comodo, google safe browsing and some others) and now we have maybe 3 requests per week regarding security. We chose Comodo because all big stores in my market use Comodo or Symantec (too expensive), so people would recognize it.

We also have same request and planning to make website secured by SSL for the same reason. full site or just few required pages depend on how fast it will load on HTTPS.

I do plan for
SPDY 3.1 - superior than HTTP2 in the benchmarks
general SSL optimization