A small overview of the optimization techniques that we are talking about:
1. Varnish -- a reverse proxy, resides in front of your web server and responds to cached contents.. since it is threaded as well for each client connection, the response time and server resources reduce a lot 2. Boost -- static page caching, stores html (can also store the gzipped version of the html) for a request (if cached) and checks it at the htaccess level itself.. page load and response time are significantly improved 3. Memcached -- memory key-value storage of small chunk of data that is stored in the RAM and reduces the load of database calls.. usually used for cache tables of Drupal, the BLOB format data is rendered from RAM directly.. reduces database load and therefore response time reduces
Aligned to your requirement, all of these work only in case of anonymous requests.
1. Running Varnish 2.x should not be a problem (and personally Varnish has been my favorite of the lot, given that Apache requires a bunch of modules eating a lot of memory, I'd be more than happy to by-pass it for anonymous requests :-)) -- following links can be helpful 1. http://drupal.org/project/varnish 2. http://drupal.org/node/1196916 3. http://www.lullabot.com/articles/varnish-multiple-web-servers-drupal 2. Boost -- drupal 7 boost module works fine, without the conditional cache reset part.. I have been planning to work on that since a long time, seems like a good time to do that.. will keep you posted once i've done something substantial there.. because boost is not stable, I would not take chances now 3. Memcache -- feasible but cannot server as an alternative to boost or varnish (both on server load and response time)
So, yes, my guess is to go for Varnish 2.x version (3.x has issues with the current module for multi-server installations and it does not seem to offer a lot compared to 2.x when it comes to single server installation).
And please share your findings/observation after your success :-)
On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 11:04 PM, DTH david@hartster.org wrote:
I'm currently setting up my first big Drupal site that requires caching. The vast majority of the traffic is anonymous, so we can cache full pages. Currently, for a somewhat smaller site on D6, we use Boost, which works pretty well. The only other requirements are: ideally have relatively smart expiration of caches (as well as clearing cache on page updates, things like updating related views on node updates) and it definitely needs to work with Domain Access (shouldn't be a problem I don't think for most caching solutions?). Also, caching that can also works for logged in users would be a bonus, but unnecessary. (ie. it would be nice if things were quicker for admin users, but that's lower down the scale of things)
What's the easiest/safest/most foolproof/most common way to cache things on Drupal 7?
Drupal 7's native cache - stores it in the database? Would ideally want to avoid the database entirely. Boost - seems to have slowed down a lot on development for D7? Varnish - have never used but this seems the most common D7 way - anything to be aware of? If Varnish listens on port 80, and I also have non-Drupal pages on the same domain, how do you pass through things so people can access example.com/nondrupal/page? Do I need a reverse proxy or will Varnish pass it through itself? If starting from scratch, which version of Varnish should I use? Memcached - presumably am fine to use this alongside Varnish/Boost for logged in users. Do I just drop it in and use it for all systems (caching, sessions, locking)? -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]