cache function ?

[furimedia]

Hi guys

I been looking into some type of reverse proxies like squid / varnish and I was wondering, is Litespeed's caching basically the same thing as them?

I just want a simple caching daemon on the server for better performance. I was wondering how much of a performance boost can I get with it?

Also if I were to go with varnish, how would i set that up in vhost environment? it seems whatever i do, it just seem to pull out my domains from my DocumentRoot instead of my vhost conf file.



thx

[mistwang]

Yes, 4.0's cache function is equivalent to squid/varnish. It should perform better than those two.
As to performance gain, it depends on the cache size, cacheable pages, hit rate etc.

[furimedia]

Thanks for the reply.
But wondering, when do you expect 4.0 to be out of Beta?

Because I'd really love to start using the cache feature as soon as possible.

[mistwang]

It will take a while, however, the cache function should be pretty stable, 4.0 in beta mainly because the SSI implement need more time to test.

[Marcus]

Hi,

I've tried enabling the cache function on the standard version 4.0b2, and that seems to work. However, no caching seems to happen. I've read that you need a 2-cpu license to try the cache function. Can I presume this means that it won't work on the standard version, even though you can set it in the admin panel? If this is correct, would it not be better to identify that you can't use it in the panel itself?

Thanks.

[mistwang]

That's correct. We will tell user this function is not available in the web console for standard edition.

[muiruri]

Hi George,

You mentioned sometime back cache feature in LSWS 4.x would be equivalent to varnish, which is exactly what we need badly! as our varnish equivalent.

To make use of it, I believe we simply go to; Configuration -> Cache
menu option, where we have two categories; "Cache Storage Settings" & "Cache Policy"

(a) At the 1st category, is storage path any folder on my cpanel server, & do I create a folder such as; /home/cache/ ?

(b) Max Object, what do you recommend?

(c) On next category when I pass my mouse over icon for "Enable Cache" says;

"Specify whether to turn on cache for current context, either at server level, virtual host level or directory level."

But when i click on edit to do select only have "yes" or "no" to enable, and there're no three options as indicated by the footnotes earlier.

Does this mean we no longer need to worry about the three levels?

(d) Do you have suggestions or recommendations for parameters to use for Cache Expire Time (seconds) and others which have "yes" & "no" ?

(e) Once above are done, must we use cache derivatives in Apache you mentioned once;

CacheEnable
CacheDisable
CacheIgnoreCacheControl
CacheMaxExpire

And if that's the case, would it be universal for all domains or one has to do this for each domain?

Which means using apache custom file for each host such as;

Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/cpanel-user/domain.com/custom.conf"

[mistwang]

Answers to your questions:
a) better put the cache directory to a dedicate disk, you can create the cache directory any where you want.
b) It really up to you, and adjust based on your site, maybe start from 500KB.
c) If you configure vhost natively, you can set that option at different level, for using with httpd.conf, it does not matter.
d) It is the same as "CacheMaxExpire", so just set appropriate value for your web app. how long you want one page being cached.
e) configuration in the default/main server section should be served as default value, you can customize it for each vhost.

[muiruri]

Thanks Geroge,

What do you think of the following;

I've created folder on the cpanel backup drive be'se it's accessed much less than the primary drive.

Therefore created folder at; /backup/cache/

I thought 1st four settings are all I need, as follows;

Storage Path: /backup/cache
Max Object Size: 1024 (this is the minimum menu allows)
Enable Cache: Yes
Cache Expire Time (seconds): 86400

The rest of the settings I left them at "NOT SET"

(i) Hope this is all I need to do and all sites will automatically start using this feature, right?

(ii) Also believe if we added a fast drive even say just a 73GB, 15,000 RPM SAS drive, we would get better cache performance than usual 7,200 RPM SATA drives, right?

(iii) I'll appreciate any additional suggestions/ideas to archive better results.


...regds, Sam

[mistwang]

Max Obj Size of 1024 is too small I think. If a page larger than 1K, LSWS will not cache it. Cache Expire time should be shorter, start from 1-5 minutes, just in case that some page should not be cached was cached.

If you use cPanel, you should rebuild Apache with mod_cache support, then go to "service configuration >> Apache Configuration ", Edit Apache include files, edit "Pre Main Include", add

CacheRoot ...
CacheEnable disk /


It will enable cache for all vhosts configured through httpd.conf .

The reason to build Apache with mod_cache and mod_disk_cache is that, Apache will fail configuration test if not.

Yes, using faster disk will help with the performance.

Be conservative with cache configuration, only let web server to cache the page when the page can be cached. be extremely careful with the option that "Ignore Cache control headers".