Experience with Varnish!

When Mellowhost first launched her servers, all of them were using “DSO” module for serving php. I can remember, one of the most commonly used caching plugin was either Eaccelerator or Xcache. Eaccelerator was preferable as cpanel Easyapache have this in their option and can be compiled automatically while rebuilding apache. As time passed, we had to choose suphp instead of dso due to many factors involved. I hope to write them down at later time why we had to move to suphp. But that actually cut the idea of using dynamic cacher in the server. Suphp kills the php process after serving, this allows all the opcode cacher to be valueless. Due to cutting off a dynamic cacher, the server started showing pretty good load average. Although it was a good trade off of IO and CPU usage in cost of security. I was searching for a cacher that would work with suphp in the same technique Litespeed (A paid web server software) does.

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