{"id":3097,"date":"2013-06-06T11:59:20","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T11:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.shineservers.com\/?p=239"},"modified":"2013-06-06T11:59:20","modified_gmt":"2013-06-06T11:59:20","slug":"how-to-optimize-heavy-traffic-wordpress-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shineservers.com\/2013\/06\/06\/how-to-optimize-heavy-traffic-wordpress-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Optimize Heavy Traffic WordPress Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m running\u00a0Varnish<\/a>\u00a0as a front-end to\u00a0Nginx<\/a>\u00a0which is runningWordPress<\/a>\u00a0loaded with the\u00a0W3-Total-Cache<\/a>\u00a0plugin. The W3-Total-Cache plugin is configured to use both\u00a0memcached<\/a><\/code>\u00a0as well as\u00a0Amazon S3<\/a>\u00a0as its CDN. All of this sits on Ubuntu Linux .<\/p>\n

Nginx<\/span><\/p>\n

The first thing I did was dump\u00a0Apache<\/a>. I love Apache, don\u2019t get me wrong, but I prefer to go with simple and fast if I have the option, and that\u2019s what Nginx offers.<\/p>\n

Again, I\u2019m using Ubuntu, so the installations here are pretty clean.<\/p>\n

\n

# install\u00a0nginx<\/code><\/p>\n

aptitude install\u00a0nginx<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

You\u2019re also going to need to install\u00a0php-fpm<\/code>\u00a0to cache PHP within Nginx.<\/p>\n

\n

# install\u00a0php-fpm<\/code><\/p>\n

aptitude install\u00a0php-fpm<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Configuration is handled by\u00a0\/etc\/nginx\/nginx.conf<\/code>, where you\u2019ll want to just do a few things:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

# Miscellaneous Options\n   sendfile        on;\n   tcp_nopush     off;\n   keepalive_timeout  30;\n   tcp_nodelay        on;\n   multi_accept     on;\n   gzip  on;\n   gzip_proxied any;\n   gzip_comp_level 2;\n   gzip_disable \"MSIE [1-6].(?!.*SV1)\";\ngzip_types text\/plain text\/css application\/x-javascript text\/xml\n application\/xml application\/xml+rss text\/javascript;<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
And then here\u2019s the site config, under\/etc\/nginx\/sites-enabled\/default<\/code>:<\/p>\n
[ A couple of options have been omitted, but they should be self-explanatory, such as server name and the port you’re listening on. ]<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
## Default location\n    location \/ {\n        root   \/var\/www\/;\n        index  index index.php;\n        try_files $uri\/ $uri \/index.php?q=$uri&$args;\n        port_in_redirect off;\n    }\n    location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|xml)$ {\n      access_log        off;\n      expires           30d;\n      root \/var\/www\/;\n    }\n    location ~ .php$ {\n        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(.*)$;\n        fastcgi_pass   backend;\n        fastcgi_index  index.php;\n        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  \/var\/www\/$fastcgi_script_name;\n        include fastcgi_params;\n        fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING     $query_string;\n        fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD   $request_method;\n        fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE     $content_type;\n        fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH   $content_length;\n        fastcgi_intercept_errors        on;\n        fastcgi_ignore_client_abort     off;\n        fastcgi_connect_timeout 60;\n        fastcgi_send_timeout 180;\n        fastcgi_read_timeout 180;\n        fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;\n        fastcgi_buffers 4 256k;\n        fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;\n        fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;\n    }\n    location ~ \/.ht {\n        deny  all;\n    }\n    location ~ \/.git {\n        deny  all;\n    }\n        location ~ \/.svn {\n            deny  all;\n    }\nupstream backend {\n            server 127.0.0.1:9000;\n    }<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
[ I’ve collected all these options from multiple sources–mostly from the official docs when possible–and have tweaked them through experimentation. Hopefully this will save you lots of time getting up and running with a decent config. ]<\/p>\n
Varnish<\/span><\/p>\n
So, Varnish is a wicked fast reverse proxy for serving up content. The idea is that if someone just requested something from your backend (Nginx), and it hasn\u2019t been long, Varnish can serve it much faster than a full web server like Apache or even Nginx.<\/p>\n
Varnish is a simple install as well when using Ubuntu.<\/p>\n
\n
# install\u00a0varnish<\/code><\/p>\n
aptitude install\u00a0varnish<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
 <\/p>\n
 backend default {\n     .host = \"localhost\";\n     .port = \"8080\";\n}\nacl purge {\n        \"localhost\";\n}\nsub vcl_recv {\n        if (req.request == \"PURGE\") {\n                if (!client.ip ~ purge) {\n                        error 405 \"Not allowed.\";\n                }\n                return(lookup);\n        }\nif (req.url ~ \"^\/$\") {\n               unset req.http.cookie;\n            }\n}\nsub vcl_hit {\n        if (req.request == \"PURGE\") {\n                set obj.ttl = 0s;\n                error 200 \"Purged.\";\n        }\n}\nsub vcl_miss {\n        if (req.request == \"PURGE\") {\n                error 404 \"Not in cache.\";\n        }\nif (!(req.url ~ \"wp-(login|admin)\")) {\n                        unset req.http.cookie;\n                }\n    if (req.url ~ \"^\/[^?]+.(jpeg|jpg|png|gif|ico|js|css|txt|gz|\nzip|lzma|bz2|tgz|tbz|html|htm)(\\?.|)$\") {\n       unset req.http.cookie;\n       set req.url = regsub(req.url, \"\\?.<\/em>$\", \"\");\n    }\n    if (req.url ~ \"^\/$\") {\n       unset req.http.cookie;\n    }\n}\nsub vcl_fetch {\n        if (req.url ~ \"^\/$\") {\n                unset beresp.http.set-cookie;\n        }\nif (!(req.url ~ \"wp-(login|admin)\")) {\n                        unset beresp.http.set-cookie;\n}\n}<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
So a key thing to realize about Varnish is that you need to get rid of cookies to see the benefit from it. If Varnish sees cookies flying back and forth, it\u2019s going to assume there\u2019s some sensitive functionality at play, and it\u2019s not going to interfere. So part of this is saying that if you don\u2019t see wp-login or wp-admin in the URL, strip the cookies.<\/p>\n
The key to the main config here at the top is that Varnish sits on port 80 as your public presentation of your website to the world, and your \u201creal\u201d web server (Nginx in our case) sits behind it on another port, e.g. 8080.<\/p>\n
Ok, so if we spin both Nginx and Varnish up at this point we\u2019ll have a website, and it\u2019ll be decently fast. What we\u2019ve done so far is:<\/p>\n