For about 8 years, I worked with Peace Brigades International. You can still find some of my writings from those days by doing a google search (actually, there are 4 pages of links there and I think they're all me). I was recently approached by PBI in Canada to help with their website which had been hacked some time ago, so I've just done that and you can see the nice results here. Does this seem like a shameless plug? Kind of, but it's also an example of how tools have evolved so much that if you know what you're doing, you can get a nice website up with surprisingly little work. This one uses Drupal of course, and when you visit it you'll see just how much time the office is putting into keeping the content up to date, which is what really matters anyway.
Four and half years ago, I wrote a blog post about Varnish, a 'front-end proxy' for webservers. My best description of it then was as a protective bubble, analogous to how it's namesake is used to protect furniture. I've been using it happily ever since.
But last week, I got to really put Varnish through a test when the picture here, posted by Fair Vote Canada (one of my clients), went viral on Facebook. And Varnish saved the server and the client in ways I didn't even expect.
1. Throughput
Varnish prides itself on efficiently delivering http requests. As the picture went viral, the number of requests was up to about 1000 per minute, which Varnish had no trouble delivering - the load was still below 1, and I saw only a small increase in memory and disk usage. Of course, delivering a single file is exactly what Varnish does best.
2. Emergency!
Unfortunately, Varnish was not able to solve a more fundamental limitation, which was the 100Mb/s network connection. Becaus…
But last week, I got to really put Varnish through a test when the picture here, posted by Fair Vote Canada (one of my clients), went viral on Facebook. And Varnish saved the server and the client in ways I didn't even expect.
1. Throughput
Varnish prides itself on efficiently delivering http requests. As the picture went viral, the number of requests was up to about 1000 per minute, which Varnish had no trouble delivering - the load was still below 1, and I saw only a small increase in memory and disk usage. Of course, delivering a single file is exactly what Varnish does best.
2. Emergency!
Unfortunately, Varnish was not able to solve a more fundamental limitation, which was the 100Mb/s network connection. Becaus…