[rt-users] nginx / varnish / apache with RT?

[ktm at rice.edu]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 09:04:25PM +1000, Chris Herrmann wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> i've been playing with an NVA setup for some lamp sites (Joomla) and the
> scaling is looking pretty amazing... still early days but initial results
> look very promising.
> 
> anyway, it got me thinking to whether varnish would work with RT. I'm
> familiar enough with it to understand the generic accelerator principle ...
> but I don't see how it would work with generated content - because of RT
> handles sessions / authentication / etc. Or is it smart enough to know that
> if I visit the same ticket twice in a row and the ticket hasn't changed, to
> give me cached content?
> 
> I've tried searching for "perl varnish" and "request tracker varnish" type
> pages but have only found one archive thread
> http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/rt/users/72455 which appears
> inconclusive - does it actually make a noticeable difference or not?
> Internally we're using a squid proxy, and we have a small number of users,
> so not sure that the static page elements being handled by varnish or nginx
> would offer a huge advantage? anyway keen to hear people's experiences or
> other thoughts on accelerating RT...
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Chris

Hi Chris,

We have tried nginx/fastCGI both with and without nginx caching the static
content. The biggest win was just moving from Apache/mod_perl to the nginx/
fastCGI. It made RT much more scalable and allowed us to manage its resource
allocation better. I do not think that varnish would do anything except add
complexity to the setup.

Regards,
Ken