Thread

i ‘m agree with Kevin. and also if site is well managed from the start of development, there will n’t be slow processing.

I too agree with Kevin and that the site needs to be constructed and engineered with performance in mind. But I disagree that, “if site is well managed from the start of development, there will n’t be slow processing.” Many situations are unique. In our case we did a lot of work to avoid many of the (or in some cases fix) many of the common pitfalls. We looked at every possible “out of the box” trick we could to employ to optimize performance with in EE. Even with that though, at a certain point you may need more and that is where a caching system like Varnish comes in (also, as Kevin recommended BTW). I don’t think it’s fair to assume that ANY platform will provide a one size fits all solution out of the box. At this years EECI conference I met other EE customers with largely trafficked sites and there are lots of tricks beyond the built-in ones to eeking the best performance out of the platform. These tricks are where the power of the community behind the platform come into play and luckily EE has a good community behind it. That’s why we felt it was important to share our experience here. I hope it proves helpful to those who can use it.

A quick addition to some trouble I ran into tonight related the Forum module and client IPs. As you can see from Dave’s posted example of the Varnish VCL file we are using set req.http.X-Forwarded-For setting to ensure we pass the actual client IP and not the IP of the Varnish server on to EE.

# Pass along client information to backend
remove req.http.X-Forwarded-For;
set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = client.ip;

We verified this was being passed and I thought that was the end of it, but tonight my forum mods reported that some users were getting posts blocked for SPAM. When I looked into it I discovered that new accounts created in EE were all being set to the same IP. The IP of our Varnish server. Turns out that we also need to tell EE that it’s OK to accept the forwarded IP from the Varnish server. This was a bug that was addressed with the addition of a new hidden config variable (proxy_ips) in a 1.6.7 update, http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/105474/.

* Added a hidden config variable proxy_ips to allow the visitor’s IP address to be properly assessed when the web server is behind a reverse proxy. (addresses bug #6629)

Adding this setting to our EE config and setting it to allow the Varnish IP address to proxy the client IPs fixed our issue.

guys, i am just taking the reference from http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/libraries/parser.html .

where mentioned:

Note: CodeIgniter does not require you to use this class since using pure PHP in your view pages lets them run a little faster.

we use the template tags into our template and which are being parsed somewhere in libraries, modules, ad-ones files.

it may also be a cause of slowing a huge page.

i ‘m not in favor of using php code into templates 😊

please share your thoughts on it.

I see we kind of took this thread in a different direction with a focus on the Varnish stuff, but it’s now moving back to what it’s original intent was as a general discussion of EE performance for big sites.

Dan, in light of that I think I might agree with Dave about our Varnish focused branch of this breaking out into a more focused topic, what do you think?