Summary of loader.io results
With 150 concurrent users today on a custom Drupal 6 distro, loader.io reported a response time of 200ms when the load was at it's highest (150 concurrent users). Running top on the 512mb SSD vps account showed the highest load reached was 2.5. There were 3366 successful responses and no errors in the 60 seconds that the test ran. We had to switch off lfd/csf by running csf -x as root and remove the limit_conn limit set in the vhost file, which Octopus sets on all it's managed sites.
These are fantastic results! This allows us to host at least 10 low anonymous traffic sites on low end vbox without any compromise to user experience. We already have this running on 4 production vboxes with close to 40 low to medium traffic websites.
Questions about caching on BOA
My concern is about the initial page load. Our cache is set to 1 hour for anon users. For low traffic sites 1 hour would be too short a period, with the user often experiencing a wait of up to 4 seconds for an un-cached page to load.
Any suggestions for a better way to improve the load time for rebuilt cache pages?
Would boost be a better option for low anonymous traffic sites with infrequent updates?
Should we look at increasing the Speed Booster cache expire time for anonymous traffic?
The delay is with mysql and php. Our code is optimized. Minified, gzipped js and css, as well as other common assets are delivered from cloudfront.