Sensible Performance/Growth Strategies?

[Alex Sergeyev]

On Thu, 2010-08-05 at 19:40 +0400, Igor Sysoev wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 10:08:54AM -0500, Raina Gustafson wrote:
> > How does it compare with Varnish?
> > What tools do you use for stress testing/performance measurements?
> I did not run tests.

Raina, my 2 cents below...

It depends on your application and needs. There is no magic bullet in
web-performance world.

Small site / big site, audience location, content sizes, numbers of
linked static files, etc etc etc, hardware bottleneck, operating system,
network connectivity, redundancy & failover needs, everything is very
much different for every project.

For average small site (let's say 10000 pageviews/day) differences
between Varnish and nginx will be almost identical. Remember that
Varnish created to keep as much stuff in memory as possible, and nginx
is based on OS internal things to provide performance. 

I'm not sure about internals of each project and how they work under
Linux vs FreeBSD servers. This could be a decision reason too.

Don't forget about backend and application optimization too. There is
usually lots of improvements too. If you want to reach peaks of
performance you should probably consider benchmarks on every workflow
that your users go through and see how fast your backend code is.



Alex.