This post is part of Tero Karvinen’s course: Linux as server. Even it is related to school mission it will offer usefull information about GNU/Linux!
Before final test of the course Mr. Karvinen introduced solutions to improve server performance with proxy. My last mission was:
- Do apache`s pressure test with static and dynamic WordPress pages
- Install Varnish, do pressure test again and examine the results
- Make .iso images pass varnish
- Analyse pages with yslow (firefox addon)
All tests made with Xubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin 32bit.
Hardware:
- Motherboard: Asus Z87-C
- CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz
- RAM: 8GB DDR3 1600MHz
- HDD: 120GB SSD Sata 3.0
- GPU: Geforce GTX 560 Ti Phantom, 2GB GDDR5 (Gainward)
- Asus cd/dvd
Preparing for benchmark test
First I needed two sites static and dynamic ones. I already had wordpress installed so I decided to use that as dynamic site. I went to index-page of WordPress with Firefox, right-clicked on site and then pressed “View Page Source”. I had source of singe wordpress-page which I could use as static page. I copied the source to clipboard and went to terminal.
$ cd
$ cd public_html/
$ mkdir static
$ cd static/
$ nano index.html
CTRL+v->CTRL+x->y->ENTER
Then I tested if the pages look similar
$ firefox http://localhost/~tuukka/wordpress/
$ firefox http://localhost/~tuukka/static
Both pages looked exactly the same. What makes them different to each other is that page on http://localhost/~tuukka/wordpress/ is build from mysql database with php, html and css. Static page just contains pure html and css.
Benchmark before varnish
I used apache`s own benchmark tool ab in these forms:
$ ab -c 150 -n 1000 http://localhost/~tuukka/wordpress
$ ab -c 150 -n 1000 http://localhost/~tuukka/static
Here are results in same image:
At this point I realised there might be something I am doing wrong since results are so close to each other. I made fresh install of wordress and made new post. I also made static version of that post page. Here is the new page:
I made same tests again with new pages.
$ ab -c 150 -n 1000 http://localhost/~tuukka/wordpress/?p=4
$ ab -c 150 -n 1000 http://localhost/~tuukka/static/index.html
I got totally different kind of results with new setup. 1000 page loads 150 at the same time took 24.157seconds with dynamic page and 0.049 with static page.
Varnish installation
I installed package.
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install varnish
Then I made apache to listen on port 8080 instead default 80. I edited ports.conf lines NameVirtualHost and Listen.
$ sudoedit /etc/apache2/ports.conf
# If you just change the port or add more ports here, you will likely also # have to change the VirtualHost statement in # /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default # This is also true if you have upgraded from before 2.2.9-3 (i.e. from # Debian etch). See /usr/share/doc/apache2.2-common/NEWS.Debian.gz and # README.Debian.gz NameVirtualHost *:8080 Listen 8080 <IfModule mod_ssl.c> # If you add NameVirtualHost *:443 here, you will also have to change # the VirtualHost statement in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl # to <VirtualHost *:443> # Server Name Indication for SSL named virtual hosts is currently not # supported by MSIE on Windows XP. Listen 443 </IfModule>
I also made changes to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default as the third line in ports.conf said.
$ sudoedit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
Changed: VirtualHost *:80 -> VirtualHost *:8080
ServerName tuukka-xubuntu
<VirtualHost *:8080>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Tested if it was working by restarting apache and trying to load page.
$ sudo service apache2 restart
$ firefox localhost
Led me to “Unable to connect page
$ firefox localhost:8080
Worked perfectly!
Then the varnish setup. I made changes to /etc/default/varnish.
$ sudoedit /etc/default/varnish
There was different setups ready to use. By default it was using “Alternative 2” configuration which allows VCL. I decided to use it aswell and changed the port of line starting with: DAEMON_OPTS
... ## Alternative 2, Configuration with VCL # # Listen on port 6081, administration on localhost:6082, and forward to # one content server selected by the vcl file, based on the request. Use a 1$ # fixed-size cache file. # DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \ -T localhost:6082 \ -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \ -S /etc/varnish/secret \ -s malloc,256m" ...
Then I restarted varnish and tried if it was working.
$ sudo service varnish restart
$ firefox localhost
This led me to apaches default “It works” page and I noticed that varnish is working since apache is not listening default port.
Benchmark with varnish
Varnish is now configured and working. I made same tests again.
$ ab -c 150 -n 1000 http://localhost/~tuukka/wordpress/?p=4
$ ab -c 150 -n 1000 http://localhost/~tuukka/static/index.html
With dynamic page the improvement was clear. I noticed that with static page it was not so clear and it was actually slower to load than dynamic page. I do not know the reason. I tried test couple of times and all results were almost same. Here are example results:
Summary of the benchmark
Dynamic page
Without varnish:Time taken for tests: 24.157 seconds
Longest request: 9931 ms
With varnish:
Time taken for tests: 2.525 seconds
Longest request: 2489 ms
Static page
Without varnish:
Time taken for tests: 0.049 seconds
Longest request: 13 ms
With varnish:Time taken for tests: 3.944 seconds
Longest request: 3927 ms
With these results I would say Varnish is must if there is huge amount of traffic with dynamic pages.
How to make .iso images pass Varnish
First I tried what happens if I am trying to download .iso image through Varnish. I downloaded xubuntu-13.10 .iso and putted it under the public_html. I tried to download it and I got this funny guru meditation page. I am not quite sure what is exact reason for it. I guess it might be something related to memory of Varnish.
$ firefox localhost/~tuukka/xubuntu-13.10-desktop-i386.iso
I googled a bit and found this Jukka Pentti`s blog. He was tried to make this work by editing /etc/varnish/default.vcl put did not tested it.
$ sudoedit /etc/varnish/default.vcl
I added this:
if (req.url ~“\.iso$”) {
set req.backend = web;
pass;
}
$ sudo service varnish restart
At this point I got this message:
* Stopping HTTP accelerator varnishd [ OK ]
* Starting HTTP accelerator varnishd [fail]
Message from VCC-compiler:
Syntax error at
('input' Line 12 Pos 14)
if (req.url ~“\.iso$”) {
-------------#--------------
Running VCC-compiler failed, exit 1
VCL compilation failed
Obviously there is something wrong with the script I just added to default.vcl. I tried some debugging with this but it did not solved. I decided to google again and I found mikkott`s blog where he solved problem by passing all over 200mb files from varnish.
$ sudoedit /etc/varnish/default.vcl
Added this under backend default script:
sub vcl_recv {
if (req.http.x-pipe && req.restarts > 0) {
remove req.http.x-pipe;
return (pipe);
}
}
sub vcl_fetch {
if (beresp.http.Content-Length ~ "[0-9]{8,}" ) {
set req.http.x-pipe = "1";
return (restart);
}
}
Then I restarted Varnish and tried to download .iso again.
$ sudo service varnish restart
$ firefox localhost/~tuukka/xubuntu-13.10-desktop-i386.iso
After that guru did not meditated again and I was able to download .iso!
Page analysis with yslow
Yslow is plugin for firefox. I installed it from firefoxes add-ons manager. It was not working out of the box. Turned out that it might need firebug plugin to work. I installed firebug and reboot firefox. Made inspection with firebug(right clicked somewhere in any page) and after that yslow was also working.
I decided to analyse two different well known finnish sites mtv3.fi and yle.fi. Here are the results in one image:
Overal scores:
yle.fi
Grade: DOverall performance score 69
mtv3.fi
Grade: D
Overall performance score 60
http://localhost/~tuukka/wordpress/ (this is the page used in varnish test)
Grade: A
Overall performance score 94
Based on these results seems like mtv3.fi is little bit faster to load. Yslow gave lots of information of these two sites. If I would like to make yle.fi load faster I would start from these yslow`s high priority suggestions:
This page has 13 external Javascript scripts. Try combining them into one.
This page has 4 external stylesheets. Try combining them into one.
This page has 25 external background images. Try combining them with CSS sprites.
Sources
http://terokarvinen.com/2013/aikataulu-–-linux-palvelimena-ict4tn003-11-ja-12-kevaalla-2014
Varnishin ja Nginx asennus Ubuntu serveriin
http://jukkapentti.wordpress.com/tag/varnish/
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