Making dynamic sites scale like static sites

Making dynamic sites scale like static sites Wim Godden Cu.be Solutions

Who am I ?
Wim Godden (@wimgtr)
Owner of Cu.be Solutions (http://cu.be)
PHP developer since 1997
Developer of OpenX
Zend Certified Engineer
Zend Framework Certified Engineer
MySQL Certified Developer

Who are you ?
Developers ?
System/network engineers ?
Managers ?
Varnish ?
Nginx ?

Making dynamic sites scale like static sites (aka "Nginx-PHP on steroids") Wim Godden Cu.be Solutions

Varnish
Not just a load balancer
Reverse proxy cache / http accelerator / …
Caches (parts of) pages in memory
Careful :
uses threads (like Apache)
Nginx usually scales better (but doesn't have VCL)

Varnish - ESI
Perfect for caching pages
In your article page output : <esi:include src="/news.php"/> In your Varnish config : sub vcl_fetch { if (req.url == "/news.php") { esi; /* Do ESI processing */ set obj.ttl = 2m; } elseif (req.url == "/nav.php") { esi; set obj.ttl = 1m; } elseif …. … . }

Varnish - what can/can't be cached ?
Can :
Static pages
Images, js, css
Static parts of pages that don't change often (ESI)
Can't :
POST requests
Very large files (it's not a file server !)
Requests with Set-Cookie
User-specific content

ESI -> no caching on user-specific content ? Logged in as : Wim Godden 5 messages TTL = 5min TTL=1h TTL = 0s ?

Dynamic content Request Varnish Ideally user X : /top /top request to Apache same user Y : /top /top request to Apache same user X : /top /top request to Apache if unchanged : served from cache user Y : /top /top request to Apache if unchanged : served from cache

Coming to Nginx soon... Logged in as : Wim Godden 5 messages NEWS Menu

Coming to Nginx soon... <esim:include src="/news" ttl="5m" /> <esim:include src="/menu" ttl="1h" /> <esim:include src="/top" usesession="1" ttl="1h" />

Requesting /page (1 st time) Nginx /page /page

Requesting /page ESI subrequests (1 st time) Nginx /menu.php /news.php /top.php ($sessionid$)

Requesting /page (next time) Nginx /page /menu.php /news.php /top.php ($sessionid$) /page

New message arrives...
top.php ($sessionid$)
DB

Advantages
No repeated hits to PHP anymore !
Only the initial hit (unless you pre-heat/warm up the cache !)
No hits for user-specific content
Not even for non-specific content

News added
news.php
DB

Do we need TTLs ? Logged in as : Wim Godden 5 messages <esim:include src="/news" ttl="5m" /> <esim:include src="/menu" ttl="1h" /> <esim:include src="/top" usesession="1" ttl="1h" />

Advantages
No repeated hits to backend anymore !
Only the initial hit (unless you pre-heat/warm up the cache !)
Not for user-specific content
Not even for non-specific content
No TTLs for non-specific content
TTL for user-specific content is required (defaults to 5min)
Imagine doing it for the bid status on Ebay items ;-)
No need to specify per-URL ESI parameters in configuration file
Except when full page is dynamic (and you want to cache it)
-> so this doesn't just work for ESI pages
Uses lots of regular expressions

How many Memcache requests ? Logged in as : Wim Godden 5 messages <esim:include src="/news" ttl="5m" /> <esim:include src="/menu" ttl="1h" /> <esim:include src="/top" usesession="1" ttl="1h" />

Why Nginx ?
Native Memcache support
Excellent and superfast subrequest system
Including parallel subrequests
Handles thousands of connections per worker
With minimal memory footprint
PHP-FPM integration
No need to add a separate caching layer
Local = faster
Easier to debug performance issues (esp. with slow script feature)

Under development
Feature set = unclear
Performance = even more unclear
Debugging code makes it slow
Benchmarks for an upcoming conference
Extends ESI standard, but doesn't follow it entirely
(what standard ?)
Release date ?
Beta : Dec 2011
Stable : Feb 2012

Questions ?

Contact
Twitter @wimgtr
Web http://techblog.wimgodden.be
Slides http://www.slideshare.net/wimg
E-mail [email_address]

Please...
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Thanks !

Making dynamic sites scale like static sites

by Wim Godden

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