LiteSpeed Support Forums - [Solved] LiteSpeed Cache + Joomla

Joomla is a fairly populate content management system (CMS). It is a common sense that most Web sites have content that does not change frequently should use caching techniques to reduce load to server and improve end user experience. Joomla itself has three levels of caching:

1. Page caching
2. View caching
3. Module caching

Page caching is the one that significantly improves performance (8 times faster). However, the cache result (in html format) is saved as a php file in docroot/cache/page directory. IOW, php is still invoked to serve these pages.

LiteSpeed Caching

LiteSpeed webserver (LSWS) cache bypasses php invocation and serves cached page directly from LSWS cache. Hence a much bigger performance improvement can be achieved.

To work with Joomla (cached for guest visitor only), LSWS cache relies on a cookie token to differentiate whether a user is logged in or not. However, Joomla assigns cookie to any user (guest and logged in). cookie value changes as same session go through different stage (such as before login, after login, logout and log back in, etc) while cookie key stays the same. The easy way is the create desired cookie in joomla by modifying its code (small modification in login/logout stage). Login/Logout functions are located in the standard user component (docroot/component/com_user/controller.php).

The modification is as follows:

Code:

function login() {

                if(!JError::isError($error))

                {

                        // Redirect if the return url is not registration or login

                        if ( ! $return ) {

                                $return = 'index.php?option=com_user';

                        }

                        setcookie("loginuser","yes");     //  <==== add this line  # add "loginuser=yes" cookie upon successful login

                       $mainframe->redirect( $return );

Code:

function logout ()

                if(!JError::isError($error))

                {

                        setcookie("loginuser", "", time()-86400*365);  // <=== add this line # drop "loginuser" cookie upon logout.

                        if ($return = JRequest::getVar('return', '', 'method', 'base64')) {

                                $return = base64_decode($return);

                                if (!JURI::isInternal($return)) {

                                        $return = '';

                                }

                        }

Once test ok, implement rewrite rules to enable LSWS cache for the resources that required caching.

In file joomla_docroot/.htaccess

Code:

########## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section

#

RewriteRule p.php - [L]

RewriteCond &#37;{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond &#37;{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteCond &#37;{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php

RewriteCond &#37;{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.php|\.html|\.htm|\.feed|\.pdf|\.raw|/[^.]*)$  [NC]

RewriteRule (.*) index.php 

RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:&#37;{HTTP:Authorization},L]

#

########## End - Joomla! core SEF Section

Change to

Code:

########## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section

#

RewriteRule p.php - [L]

RewriteCond &#37;{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond &#37;{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.php|\.html|\.htm|\.feed|\.pdf|\.raw|/[^.]*)$  [NC]

RewriteRule (.*) index.php 

#### There is no need for this ENV

#RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

#

########## End - Joomla! core SEF Section



########## Begin - Rules for LSWS cache

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^HEAD|GET$

RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !loginuser

RewriteCond %{ORG_REQ_URI} !^/index.php$

RewriteCond %{ORG_REQ_URI} !^/administrator/

RewriteCond %{ORG_REQ_URI} (\.php|\.html|\.htm|\.feed|\.pdf|\.raw|/[^.]*)$  [NC]

RewriteRule .* - [E=Cache-Control:max-age=300,L]

########## End - Rules for LSWS cache

Explanation of the added rules:
1. Only cache for Head or Get requests
2. Cache for guest user (no loginuser cookie)
3. Cache request to any URLs like ((\.php|\.html|\.htm|\.feed|\.pdf|\.raw|/[^.]*)$) but excluding /index.php, and /administrator/*
4. Cache for 300 seconds

Note:
1. Joomla's login form (index.php) is not cache friendly (contain a security token) and has to be excluded from being cached.
2. /administrator/* is the Joomla backend. No need to be cached.

LSWS Cache Policy configuration (Admin Console -> Server/Vhost ->Cache-> Cache Policy).

Cache Policy:

Quote:

Enable Cache: ==> No
Cache Expire Time (seconds): => Not Set
Cache Request with Query String: => Yes
Cache Request with Cookie: => Yes
Cache Response with Cookie: => Yes
Ignore Request Cache-Control: => Yes
Ignore Response Cache-Control: => Yes

To verify if a resource is served out of LSWS cache is simple, just look for "X-LiteSpeed-Cache: hit" in server response header. If the header is present, the resource IS served from LSWS cache.

Quote:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:14:38 GMT
Server: LiteSpeed
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
X-LiteSpeed-Cache: hit
Content-Length: 6141
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11
P3P: CP="NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM"
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Expires: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 00:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:14:12 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache

Benchmark Comparison

Following is the ab benchmark of the test sites in our lab against latest Joomla 1.5 (1.5.22) with sample data comes with install.

Litespeed Cache + Joomla 1.5.22 (with NO system cache plugin)

Code:

    

Benchmarking 192.168.0.56 (be patient).....done





Server Software:        LiteSpeed/4.1RC4

Server Hostname:        192.168.0.56

Server Port:            8088



Document Path:          /joomla-overview.html

Document Length:        12422 bytes



Concurrency Level:      10

Time taken for tests:   0.139489 seconds

Complete requests:      100

Failed requests:        0

Write errors:           0

Total transferred:      1363478 bytes

HTML transferred:       1316732 bytes

Requests per second:    716.90 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request:       13.949 [ms] (mean)

Time per request:       1.395 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate:          9541.97 [Kbytes/sec] received



Connection Times (ms)

              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

Connect:        0    0   0.0      0       0

Processing:     5   12   4.2     12      22

Waiting:        5   11   3.9     11      21

Total:          5   12   4.2     12      22



Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)

  50%     12

  66%     12

  75%     13

  80%     15

  90%     21

  95%     21

  98%     22

  99%     22

 100%     22 (longest request)

Joomla 1.5.22 with Page Caching (system cache plugin)

Code:

  

Benchmarking 192.168.0.56 (be patient).....done





Server Software:        LiteSpeed/4.1RC4

Server Hostname:        192.168.0.56

Server Port:            8088



Document Path:          /joomla-overview.html

Document Length:        12537 bytes



Concurrency Level:      10

Time taken for tests:   2.492758 seconds

Complete requests:      100

Failed requests:        0

Write errors:           0

Total transferred:      1306000 bytes

HTML transferred:       1253700 bytes

Requests per second:    40.12 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request:       249.276 [ms] (mean)

Time per request:       24.928 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate:          511.48 [Kbytes/sec] received



Connection Times (ms)

              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

Connect:        0    0   0.0      0       0

Processing:    51  243 159.6    215    1226

Waiting:       43  203 147.5    181    1080

Total:         51  243 159.6    215    1226



Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)

  50%    215

  66%    256

  75%    275

  80%    283

  90%    324

  95%    436

  98%    959

  99%   1226

 100%   1226 (longest request)

Joomla 1.5.22 with NO Page Caching

Code:

Benchmarking 192.168.0.56 (be patient).....done





Server Software:        LiteSpeed/4.1RC4

Server Hostname:        192.168.0.56

Server Port:            8088



Document Path:          /joomla-overview.html

Document Length:        12490 bytes



Concurrency Level:      10

Time taken for tests:   9.218677 seconds

Complete requests:      100

Failed requests:        92

   (Connect: 0, Length: 92, Exceptions: 0)

Write errors:           0

Total transferred:      1296527 bytes

HTML transferred:       1246727 bytes

Requests per second:    10.85 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request:       921.868 [ms] (mean)

Time per request:       92.187 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate:          137.33 [Kbytes/sec] received



Connection Times (ms)

              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

Connect:        0    0   0.9      0       5

Processing:   256  893 578.1    748    3065

Waiting:      248  828 567.9    694    2878

Total:        256  893 578.1    748    3065



Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)

  50%    748

  66%    868

  75%    933

  80%   1058

  90%   1672

  95%   2396

  98%   2892

  99%   3065

 100%   3065 (longest request)