GeoDirectory, Varnish, and Cloudways

This topic contains 22 replies, has 5 voices, and was last updated by  Guust 8 years, 6 months ago.

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  • September 25, 2015 at 1:41 am #54462

    Good Faith Hope
    Buyer
    Post count: 66

    Hi,

    After some problems at SiteGround and researching this forum, I decided to migrate my site to Cloudways VPS. I’m wondering about using Varnish. I’ve read in the forum that it should be disabled. The folks at Cloudways gave me this response:

    Further regarding varnish, can you please let us know the reason for keeping it disable as it is very necessary for site speed and serves the site faster without impacting the server performance ? We suggest W3TC as a caching plugin for wordpress as it is compatible with our webstack and works better with varnish on our stack

    I’m assuming that W3TC is not going to work at all with Geodirectory and I do have GD Booster. Is there anything I can do to optimize the Cloudways server so Varnish and GD Booster work well together? I’m not a techie, but perhaps I can pass on the information to someone who can help me at Cloudways.

    Any help is appreciated, thanks.

    (By the way, I’m not using the Multilocations addon.)

    September 25, 2015 at 12:25 pm #54492

    Guust
    Moderator
    Post count: 29970

    All you need is GD Booster, no other caching works with GD.

    September 25, 2015 at 4:28 pm #54513

    Paolo
    Site Admin
    Post count: 31206

    Varnish breaks PHP Sessions and GeoDirectory heavily relies on PHP Sessions.

    W3TC I would suggest it only for a blog or static website.

    Thanks

    September 26, 2015 at 3:40 pm #54640

    Good Faith Hope
    Buyer
    Post count: 66

    Hey guys,

    I tested my page with gtmetrix. My PageSpeed score is 76%, my YSlow score is 78%, page load time 10.1s, and there are 140 requests.

    When I look at the page source, I also don’t see the note that GD Booster is working. At least now my pages aren’t broken, but it’s definitely not fast.

    September 26, 2015 at 3:41 pm #54641

    Good Faith Hope
    Buyer
    Post count: 66
    This reply has been marked as private.
    September 27, 2015 at 8:01 am #54697

    Good Faith Hope
    Buyer
    Post count: 66

    Here’s a shot of my free CPU since I got up and started navigating the site this morning. It’s kind of crazy. I really need some help to get GD Booster working properly. If it is working properly, then it’s definitely not enough. My server size is 1G with 30GB storage and only 1 website with hardly any traffic at all.

    September 27, 2015 at 9:13 am #54702

    Good Faith Hope
    Buyer
    Post count: 66

    I just created a copy of my site with exactly the same plugins enabled, and strangely, at the bottom of the page source it shows that GD Booster is working! (The page load time is better, but not great at 6.6 seconds, and the PageSpeed and YSlow scores are still C’s.)

    I’m not sure why it’s working on an exact copy of the site, but not on the main site. My main site is running through Cloudflare, so I paused it to check if GD Booster would start working, and it didn’t.

    Any help is appreciated. Thanks

    September 28, 2015 at 9:51 am #54785

    Stiofan O’Connor
    Site Admin
    Post count: 22956

    Hi Dee,

    The graph you attached shows the Idel CPU, the lower the % the businer the CPU is, so this is only spiking to full load (0%) a few times , this is normal, you can read about it more here: https://support.cloudways.com/entries/97946303-Do-I-need-to-scale-my-server-up-

    Thanks,

    Stiofan

    September 28, 2015 at 10:06 am #54786

    Good Faith Hope
    Buyer
    Post count: 66

    Thanks. That doesn’t address the issue that GD Booster is not working on my site. When I check the page source, it does not show up. I was not aware when I purchased GeoDirectory and other addons that other caching options were closed to me. Visitors tell me that the site is slow. It is very slow, with very little traffic. I’m afraid to even send out an email blast to 95 members because the traffic crashes my site.

    I understand the Idle CPU graph. But the times it spikes are when I am navigating the site. One person navigating should not cause it to spike.

    Could you please check the page source and confirm that GD Booster is not working?

    September 28, 2015 at 2:38 pm #54840

    Good Faith Hope
    Buyer
    Post count: 66
    This reply has been marked as private.
    September 28, 2015 at 2:54 pm #54843

    Paolo
    Site Admin
    Post count: 31206

    Hi Dee,

    I can no longer login, however Stiofan assures me that GD Booster when activated is working correctly on your website.

    To speed up your website, you need to either make it lighter or get a much more powerful server.

    Yes, we recommend that Cloudways package for GeoDirectory, but on top your are also running BBpress and Buddypress (both as resource consuming as GeoDirectory), plus several other plugins.

    In addition, your home page is 3MB heavy. That means that everytime someone access your website, the equivalent of a 3 minutes MP3 has to be downloaded, just to see the home page. Keeping your home page to around 1MB is a must for any website.

    For example, our website home page is 1.2MB and we are running our website on a dedicated server with 24GB of RAM.

    Metaphorically speaking, if you need to transport an elephant, you can’t pretend to do it with a small Van, you will need a big truck!

    Thank you!

    September 28, 2015 at 2:56 pm #54844

    Paolo
    Site Admin
    Post count: 31206

    p.s. not Varnish, nor any caching plugin could currently solve your problem. You either need less weight or a lot more server power.

    September 28, 2015 at 3:12 pm #54851

    Good Faith Hope
    Buyer
    Post count: 66

    Hi Paolo, I have already included the new credentials above.

    When GD Booster was working on my old server, the main page was generating ~67 requests; right now it is 132 requests with less content on the homepage than before. Other indicators tell me that GD Booster is not working on my site on this server as it worked before.

    In the GD Booster documentation, it says to check the page source to see the note on the bottom that GD Booster is working. This does not appear on my site. (It DOES appear on my staging site, so I know what it should look like.) Once I get GD Booster working, I can consider adding more server resources, but I cannot keep throwing money at this problem. I moved from Premium Press to GeoDirectory because of the improved features. But optimizing this has been very hard for me. A very frustrating experience.

    Please show me the note in the page source that GD Booster is working, and if so, I’ll see if I can afford to increase server resources.

    Thank you.

    September 28, 2015 at 3:16 pm #54853

    Paolo
    Site Admin
    Post count: 31206

    Now GD Booster is on, however as I said, it can’t do miracles. You still have 83 server requests and 2.9MB of homepage.

    Thanks

    September 28, 2015 at 3:40 pm #54856

    Paolo
    Site Admin
    Post count: 31206

    Hi,

    I’ve asked to Stiofan why the notes are not appearing and he said we would need FTP to check.

    However you can easily see that it is working, by just enabling/disabling GD Booster and check number of server calls made.

    With GD Booster OFF it is making +60 requests more to the server.

    148 with GDB off
    85 with GDB on.

    I’m checking with Firebug NET component. I’m not using websites to do this test as they could serve cache results.

    Thanks

    p.s. 1 Thnig that you should consider is spltting the website in 2 with multisite and use 1 website for the directory and one for Buddypress and BBpress.

    That way the server could only load what’s necessary on every page load. GeoDirectory when visiting the directory. Buddypress and BBpress when visiting the forums.

    Another thing I’d do is to try and disable every other plugin one by one and benchmark if there is one that is causing a bottleneck. If you find one with a bigger impact than expected, try to change it with an equivalent plugin.

    Let usk now how you went.

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