Author: Tonino Jankov

Varnish Cache is an HTTP accelerator and reverse proxy developed by Danish consultant and FreeBSD core developer Poul-Henning Kamp, along with other developers at Norwegian Linpro AS. It was released in 2006. According to Pingdom.com, a company focused on web performance, in 2012 Varnish was already famous among the world's top websites for its capacity to speed up web delivery, and it was being used by sites such as Wired, SlideShare, Zappos, SoundCloud, Weather.com, Business Insider, Answers.com, Urban Dictionary, MacRumors, DynDNS, OpenDNS, Lonely Planet, Technorati, ThinkGeek and Economist.com. It is licensed under a two-clause BSD license. Varnish has a premium tier, Varnish Plus, focused on enterprise customers, which offers some extra features, modules, and support. Although there a...

This article is part of a series on building a sample application --- a multi-image gallery blog --- for performance benchmarking and optimizations. (View the repo here.) Let's continue optimizing our app. We're starting with on-the-fly thumbnail generation that takes 28 seconds per request, depending on the platform running your demo app (in my case it was a slow filesystem integration between host OS and Vagrant), and bring it down to a pretty acceptable 0.7 seconds. Admittedly, this 28 seconds should only happen on initial load. After the tuning, we were able to achieve production-ready times: Troubleshooting It is assumed that you've gone through the bootstrapping process and have the app running on your machine --- either virtual or real. Note: if you're hosting the Homestead Improv...

This article is part of a series on building a sample application --- a multi-image gallery blog --- for performance benchmarking and optimizations. (View the repo here.) In this article, we'll analyze our gallery application using the tools we explained in the previous guide, and we'll look at possible ways to further improve its performance. As per the previous post, please set up Ngrok and pipe to the locally hosted app through it, or host the app on a demo server of your own. This static URL will enable us to test our app with external tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom Tools. We went and scanned our website with GTmetrix to see how we can improve it. We see that results, albeit not catastrophically bad, still have room for improvement. The first tab --- PageSpeed --- contains a list of ...

Some years ago, the Apache Foundation's web server, known simply as "Apache", was so ubiquitous that it became synonymous with the term "web server". Its daemon process on Linux systems has the name httpd (meaning simply http process) --- and comes preinstalled in major Linux distributions. It was initially released in 1995, and, to quote Wikipedia, "it played a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web". It is still the most-used web server software according to W3techs. However, according to those reports which show some trends of the last decade and comparisons to other solutions, its market share is decreasing. The reports given by Netcraft and Builtwith differ a bit, but all agree on a trending decline of Apache's market share and the growth of Nginx. Nginx --- pronounced e...

Cloudflare is an industry leader in the content-delivery space, reducing load and speeding up millions of websites. What is peculiar about this provider is that it didn't start as speed-up/performance tool, but was instead born from Project Honeypot, which was conceived as a spam and hacking protection service. To this day, this is one of Cloudflare's major selling points: DDoS detection and protection. Their algorithms take note of visitors' IP addresses, payloads, resources requested, and request frequency to detect malicious visitors. Because it sits as a proxy between websites and all incoming traffic, Cloudflare is able to reduce strain on servers significantly, so much so that DDoS attacks won't even reach the origin websites, as explained in this introduction. Cloudflare also provi...

On top of the infrastructure of the internet --- or the physical network layers --- sits the Internet Protocol, as part of the TCP/IP, or transport layer. It's the fabric underlying all or most of our internet communications. A higher level protocol layer that we use on top of this is the application layer. On this level, various applications use different protocols to connect and transfer information. We have SMTP, POP3, and IMAP for sending and receiving emails, IRC and XMPP for chatting, SSH for remote sever access, and so on. The best-known protocol among these, which has become synonymous with the use of the internet, is HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). This is what we use to access websites every day. It was devised by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN as early as 1989. The specification fo...