wp-ffpc or varnish or both?

Most probably using WP-FFPC along with varnish won’t give you any performance gain. Basically, WP-FFPC does almost what varnish does.

Hi @anointed,

Varnish can cache everything, including WordPress outputs, so basically you do not need another cache layer, but I’ll take a look into the possibilities.

@petermolnar
Thank you. As I said, I am completely new to cache layers, so my question might be irrelevant. I’m just looking to squeeze every bit of performance that I can out of my small server instance. I only went with varnish because I found a great step by step article on installing it with nginx and so far the results are amazing.

>> If I am already using varnish, will wp-ffpc help me still?

No. As already mentioned by the plugin’s author, one doesn’t need two caching layers doing the same job (full page caching).

If you already have Nginx, then this plugin can be integrated to work with memcached in such a way that the cached content can be served directly from the memory by Nginx. Varnish keeps the cache in memory too. Basically, you wouldn’t notice any difference in performance when you visit your site as a generic visitor (non-logged-in) visitor.

When you are logged-in, there is an extra lookup, when you use Varnish that passes the requests to Nginx, depending on certain conditions (logged-in user, during a miss, etc). So, if you use this plugin, you’d save a couple of requests (to and from Varnish), while logged-in. In performance optimization, every single round-trip counts.

So, if you want to squeeze your current server further, then you may use this plugin and remove Varnish.

Hi,

I personally would not recommend removing varnish.
My plugin only caches WordPress, varnish puts static content into the memory as well, which makes the whole system a lot faster.

WP-FFPC is good for limited memory or when you prefer not to cache static content for various reasons ( or you have SSDs and you don’t care ), but it’s not a full blown replacement for varnish.

Thanks for the great input guys! I am definitely going to keep varnish as it’s currently working great. I think that I will look more into the configuration file setups that I have with everything on the server and see if there is more I can squeeze there.

I haven’t even begun to read about optimizing mysql so I’m sure that there is a lot of headway I can make there for my logged in users (buddypress/bbpress). Then there is the varnish and soon to be apc configuration scripts, and of course, I’m sure there are many more I am not even thinking of like php etc..

Question solved: WP-FFPC is not a replacement for Varnish but they are fine side by side.