Varnish Plugin + DirectAdmin = OMG

UNIXy

Verified User
Joined
Jun 20, 2009
Messages
25
It's been over three months since our first successful Varnish plugin release. We're riding this good vibe and are offering the Varnish plugin for DirectAdmin. Yes!

URL: http://www.unixy.net/varnish

Why Varnish?

  • FASTER than Nginx, Litespeed, and Lighttpd.
  • Reduces server load to levels never seen before.
  • Serves pages FASTER from MEMORY instead of disks.
  • Absolutely free 14-day trial. UNIXY customers get it for Free!
  • No Apache Virtual Hosts or Rewrite rules voodoo. Keep Apache & PHP.
  • Works with suPHP, FastCGI, CGI, DSO (mod_php), mod_perl, ALL of them!

Features

  • Both Dynamic and Static Object Caching
  • Auto Upgrade / Installation of Varnish
  • Auto Installation / Deinstallation
  • Environment Detection
  • Opt-out Domain List Served Directly by Apache
  • VCL Script Compatibility

Requirements

  • DirectAdmin CP
  • CentOS > 5.5 - Supports 32-bit and 64-bit (recommended)
  • Python >= 2.4 (installed by default)
  • 200Mhz CPU w/ 24MB RAM for Installation
  • Apache 2.0.x or 2.2.x w/ PHP
  • PCRE Lib - Auto-Installed via YUM
  • PHP Curl & Curl SSL Library (Custombuild if not installed)

Testimonials

Wow, not only are my ApacheBench results are better than LiteSpeed, but the load is much lower than w/ LiteSpeed!
HD-Sam

Hello,
I have a Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) with 3GB ram:

Before to install the plugin from unixy.net (varnish plugin), at simultaneous users to one of my site's (a video sharing site) the load grew to 7-8, after installing the plugin's maximum load is 1 -1.50 . I will do other tests to come up with a comprehensive report.

I`m very shure it's faster than Nginx
Well, those results look good ,i will reply in a few days with more details.

Regards,

Eduard


So far this thing is rocking few things i suggested but other than that pretty good.


So far, I've noticed a perceivable speed increase and decreased page-load times. Our server loads have always been quite good anyway, as we take care in managing our servers, but we should be able to do even better with this though. It's very early in our testing of it, but it does look promising.


Hello,
I have a Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) with 3GB ram:

Before to install the plugin from unixy.net (varnish plugin), at simultaneous users to one of my site's (a video sharing site) the load grew to 7-8, after installing the plugin's maximum load is 1 -1.50 . I will do other tests to come up with a comprehensive report.

I`m very shure it's faster than Nginx
Well, those results look good ,i will reply in a few days with more details.

Regards,

Eduard


I did install Varnish today. in order to see the impact on the server I had one terminal window (A) in which I did the install while I was watching top in another(B). By the time my eyes moved from window A when it said the install was done over to window B where top was running the server load was plummeting pretty much the way you might expect if port 80 had been closed or Apache had died, the effect was very dramatic. I quickly tried a browser to confirm that pages were being served, and they were of course, as top indicated with httpd lines.

Load on the server had been running between 2 and 3 which is fine on a quad core server, now about a half hour later I see 0.70, 0.91, 0.99. I think the cache is still filling up.

The automatic configuration settled on using 1GB of RAM which is what I had intended to try. I've been looking at the output of free for a few days and unused memory was running about 1.6 to 2GB most of the time. Oddly it now shows more free RAM than it did before I installed Varnish.

Most of the load on my server comes from one popular Wordpress blog and one SMF forum. Both seem faster, especially the blog.

On one installation of IPB forum I was initially logged out despite having previously been logged in permanently. After logging in again I seemed to become logged out once more while changing from one board to another. This has not recurred, if others report this I'll prolly exclude that domain in the WHM interface.

Currently it appears very likely I'll end my trial with a signup because it seems to be working better than I had expected.
srider
 
Also keep in mind that we offer customized Varnish configurations on DirectAdmin for folks that need to squeeze more performance out of their server. This service is offered at no charge to UNIXy clients.

Cheers,
Joe / UNIXY
 
Hello,

this looks interesting, we will probably try it.

Is it easy to remove once installed ?
(eg i test the trial version on a server, when the trial is over, can I remove it without any hassle ?)

Is there any "lifetime license" option ?
 
Also keep in mind that we offer customized Varnish configurations on DirectAdmin for folks that need to squeeze more performance out of their server. This service is offered at no charge to UNIXy clients.

Cheers,
Joe / UNIXY

Just to clarify any ambiguity surrounding the above comment. By "UNIXy clients," I mean clients that have a VPS, dedicated server, or cluster.

Regards
 
Is varnish runs in FreeBSD OS? I have only one CloudLinux if it's good and can run in FreeBSD You will get more orders.

Do u have DC License (Dedicated Server)?
 
Does it run on Debian ?

I tried, but I couldn't install it.

server:/usr/local/directadmin/plugins/varnish.unixy.net-1.0b# python installvarnish
File "installvarnish", line 1
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xf2' in file installvarnish on line 1, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
 
I tried to make it work on debian but currently it doesn't work as intended :

Some instructions for people who want to try their luck on debian:
On debian you need to install python2.4, pcre and pcre-devel is already installed.
You also have to run aptitude remove pkg-config and aptitude install pkg-config to be able to compile varnish
python2.4 installvarnish will install you varnish and setup directadmin, unfortunately as I observed it doesn't copy the configuration files and the plugin part of directadmin, you'll have to figure out yourself how it works and mess with your DA.
Because debian doesn't have chkconfig and it isn't compatible with the centos startup script included with the plugin in fs_xxxx/etc/init.d/ you'll have to write your own, if you manage to start varnish you are good to go, I could'nt start it or if I got rid of some errors I got others related to default.vcl and so on.

Luckily the uninstall script works fine, if you aren't lucky you can run python2.4 uninstallvarnish and everything will be reverted.
 
Hi,

Per the requirements above, only CentOS 5.5 and up is supported at the moment. So Debian is not yet supported.

Requirements
  • DirectAdmin CP
  • CentOS > 5.5 - Supports 32-bit and 64-bit (recommended)
  • Python >= 2.4 (installed by default)
  • 200Mhz CPU w/ 24MB RAM for Installation
  • Apache 2.0.x or 2.2.x w/ PHP
  • PCRE Lib - Auto-Installed via YUM
  • PHP Curl & Curl SSL Library (Custombuild if not installed)

Regards
 
I'm currently trialling this script.

How to see varnish manager on directadmin ?
 
I don't see any improvement in using varnish, so I uninstalled, but why I still found these files:
Code:
[root@ns1 ~]# find / -name *varnis*
/var/run/varnish.pid
/usr/local/directadmin/plugins/addon_unixyvarnish.cgi
/usr/src/unixyvarnish
/etc/rc.d/init.d/varnishd
/etc/rc.d/rc6.d/K10varnishd
/etc/rc.d/rc4.d/K10varnishd
/etc/rc.d/rc3.d/K10varnishd
/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K10varnishd
/etc/rc.d/rc2.d/K10varnishd
/etc/rc.d/rc0.d/K10varnishd
/etc/rc.d/rc1.d/K10varnishd
/scripts/disablevarnish
[root@ns1 ~]#
how to remove varnish completely ?
 
If you encounter any issues with the plugin, please do open a request in our system. This script is not for everybody but if you have a busy website this script can improve the load and response dramatically. You can find both positive and negative reviews on WHT by following this: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1017369

Regards
 
Installation Instructions for DirectAdmin?

I wanted to try the free trial version. The installation instructions are only for cPanel. How do I install the DirectAdmin version?
 
For 1 site I already use a manual installation/config to use Varnish on top of DA Apache. I'm going to give this a shot, so it caches other websites too.
 
Will it cause problems using Varnish for sites that already is using cache plugins? Like for example WordPress sites that uses W3 Total Cache or WP Supercache, should they disable those cache plugins if I install Varnish on the server?
 
Will it cause problems using Varnish for sites that already is using cache plugins? Like for example WordPress sites that uses W3 Total Cache or WP Supercache, should they disable those cache plugins if I install Varnish on the server?

It shouldn't cause any issues. Did you give it a try?

Regards
 
For those that are not wanting to touch their DA installation and would rather run a standalone accelerator to power their DA server, take a look at Fastlayer: http://fastlayer.com

It's made to run on as small as a VM.

Regards
Joe
 
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