Varnish + Calagator

[Tim Dobson]

Hey,

Out of interest, has anyone had any experience integrating Varnish[1]
and calagator?

Cheers,

Tim

[1] http://www.varnish-cache.org/

[Igal Koshevoy]

On May 28, 2011 8:58 AM, "Tim Dobson" <li...@tdobson.net> wrote:
> Out of interest, has anyone had any experience integrating Varnish[1]
> and calagator?

Calagator will work well with Varnish or any other reverse proxy.

However, I don't expect that using Varnish will improve Calagator's performance much. The reason is that Varnish wants to cache full pages and get an eTag token to tell it whether the page had changed since the last time it saw it. To use Varnish's caching, Calagator would need to be reworked to:
- Render notification messages client-side with JavaScript rather than server-side, so the whole page can be cached.
- Generate consistent eTags efficiently, without retrieving all the records needed to build the page.

- Possibly remove or conditionally disable the current fragment caching system to avoid caching stuff at multiple levels.

If you're interested in getting your Calagator to run more quickly, the best approach currently is to run it in "production mode", use a faster computer with more memory, and run more instances.

If you're interested in making certain pages faster, the best solution is to dig through the "logs/development.log" and the controller action to understand what goes into building that page, figure out how to make the queries more efficient, and make better use of our existing fragment caching.

-igal