Sensible Performance/Growth Strategies?

[Igor Sysoev]

On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 12:24:23PM -0400, Alex Sergeyev wrote:

> 
> 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. 

Varnish relies on OS internals too: it mmap()s a huge file that
may be larger tens times physical memory and perfomance relies on
how OS flushes modified pages to a disk and how then OS reads them
back to memory.

> 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.

Both Varnish and nginx are developed on FreeBSD.


-- 
Igor Sysoev
http://sysoev.ru/en/