1

After a lot of mysql tunings, I intend to use Varnish as the last resort to improve my D6 site's performance which has become increasingly sluggish. I realized that Varnish will not work with D6. And due to lack of som contrib modules, I still can not migrate to Drupal 7 which, as I understand, makes migration to Pressflow pretty redundant.

I am using nginx + php-fpm as web server and try to avoid Apache at any cost. This approach has of course its downside, for example I could not make use of Boost module. Now my question is that whether pressflow works with my web server configuration? and whether migration is a good idea performance-wise? And Pressflow suites me, where can I find docs to make a smooth migration on Ubuntu server.

Thanks for your suggestions.

2
  • Once you've migrated over, take a look at this wiki for ideas on what to patch: groups.drupal.org/node/187209
    – mikeytown2
    Jan 5, 2012 at 1:44
  • @mikeytown2 sorry, I'm not sure what should I do with all of the links mentioned in the page.
    – hbp
    Jan 5, 2012 at 2:08

1 Answer 1

3

I have a client who takes deliveries in the form of the sites/ folder and a database backup, and installs them in Pressflow. As long as the Pressflow version isn't older than the Drupal version, we have never had problems.

There is no real migration. Just replace the files, run update.php, and move on. Two minor gotchas, though.

Pressflow error reporting is different, and a lot (and I mean a lot) of E_NOTICE will end up in the dblog. You may want to adust error_reporting to exclude these.

Pressflow is API compatible with Drupal, but I have run into situations with anonymous sessions. Occasionally, I need to manually call drupal_start_session, which is in Pressflow 6, from a custom module before I start doing stuff with $_SESSION.

Personally, I would give Zend Server CE a shot, too. The Pressflow 6 site that I am wrapping up really flies in this environment.

3
  • Yep, the "migration" was easy as breeze. However one thing that I'm not sure is that in the Varnish module I have port 6082 as default but in /etc/varnish/default.vcl the default port is 8080. I did not touch nginx settings, and really not sure that varnish is working or not?
    – hbp
    Jan 5, 2012 at 2:05
  • Port 6082 is not the HTTP port but the administration interface that you can access via the varnishadm shell command or the Varnish module. To act as a proxy, Varnish has to serve the HTTP port 80 and forward requests to the port you've put nginx on, which for example could be port 8080.
    – geewiz
    Jan 6, 2012 at 21:39
  • yeah geewiz. I solved the problem and now varnish is actually works along with nginx_php-fpm. Fantastic performance boos. Just remained few quirks that I'll address in another post.
    – hbp
    Jan 7, 2012 at 1:22

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.