Running on new hardware

I’ve just completed a server move, and the site should be back in business.

The old setup was a beefy server in my basement with 24GB RAM and eight cores. But access was via a jenky IPv6 connection over my cable modem, with external access via a varnish instance running at Digital Ocean. Something in my home network configuration causes that to be extremely unreliable, taking the site offline for days.

It’s now running on an AWS instance, which I hope to make an auto-scaling group. Actual content resides on an EFS volume, which is surprisingly performant. And it’s all behind a new application-style ELB, which also supports HTTPS and HTTP/2.

For now, I am using neither varnish nor a CDN, to see how it goes. Access is directly to the ELB, with every page hitting Apache. WP Super Cache should keep things pretty performant with any luck.

One thought on “Running on new hardware

  1. OK, so it didn’t take me long to bring varnish back into the mix. O:-)

    I’m running it in a much boring configuration, though — it’s a bog-standard configuration that’s caching only static assets as Cache-Control headers allow.

    I’m generally kind of pessimistic about this, because at small scales like mine, Apache can serve static files plenty fast, and at the huge scale where the overhead actually matters, you’re probably better off looking at a CDN.

    In this case, though, I found that the bottleneck wasn’t Apache itself, but the act reading dozens of static files from a small EFS volume. With luck they’d end up in page cache, but the multi-second load times made me think that wasn’t happening. varnish takes care of that for me!

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