[HOWTO] Install Dragonfly - faster & Redis/Memcached compatible - Enhance Control Panel

[HOWTO] Install Dragonfly - faster & Redis/Memcached compatible

Adrien

ss88us WOuaw! Thanks a lot for sharing this.

Is Enhance ready for it? @Adam Can we deploy Dragonfly and forget about Redis?
Is there anything else we should know if we deploy DF following ss888us instructions?

Adrien

Do you guys think DragonFly is compatible with LSWE? I mean there's also LSCP. Will it recognize DF in the cache settings of litespeed cache plugin?

ss88us

Dragonfly is compatible with Redis and Memcached, so any plug-in that is designed for these solutions will work. LightSpeed cache works with dragonfly.

I'm still testing dragonfly in a production environment, but so far, it's working really well.

If you have installed Redis or KeyDB via docker, my command above will also install Dragonfly alongside of these containers, so you can have both work at the same time. Just make sure you use the correct IP.

For every website, I would recommend making sure the WP_CACHE_KEY_SALT is different, that way there will be no databases clashes. You can also change the database number, but making sure the cache key salt is different will also work even if a website uses the same database.

Adrien

@ss88us Should I add this into my wp-config.php for each website?

define('NONCE_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('WP_CACHE_KEY_SALT', 'example.com');

Then no need to change database number right?

I hope Enhance has soon a system to auto generate these keys as well as all the others because it's unmanageable if this is to be done each time manually/per website.

ss88us

Adrien Hi Adrien,

You just need WP_CACHE_KEY_SALT (if it's not already present) and you can use any value in there. This generates strings you could use.

I'm assuming you're using a Redis cache plugin?

Adrien

ss88us Thank you! Have you really noticed better perf with DF vs Redis? We would need to run tests on heavy WooCommerce/LMS sites to really compare both.

At the moment the combo that most of the hosting companies offer is Relay + Object cache pro.

The benchmark you've shared looks crazy.

ss88us

Hi Adrien,

Redis OCP will work out-of-the-box with Dragonfly.

I'm still testing this to see if there's really any benefit. In short, when testing Redis, KeyDB, and Dragonfly, I couldn't see a noticeable difference, so the differences are likely seen when a website is under heavy load or something else.

On top of the memory based dockers, I also tested a WordPress plugin called Docket Cache which does not use any memory database driven dockers and only uses PHP files. My servers have NVMes, and even this plugin shows similar speed differences to the memory ones, which I was surprised at.

Adrien

Hey ss888us. Indeed this plugin looks great I'm going to test it. Appreciate your sharing.

kyzoeadmin

Adrien did you test allready?

Adrien

kyzoeadmin I didn't because I won't have the technical knowledge in case anything goes south. So, I've decided to wait for official support.

manu

Hi @ss88us are you able to successfully use DragonflyDB? Would love to know your feedback.

AdamM

manu yes, I also use.

Ned

Looks good, Will have to try this soon.

Are you using it with Full Page Caching or solely letting it do Object Caching?

And what's your go-to caching plugin for WordPress if any?

Cheers

Ned

Same questions for everyone in this thread actually, Don't meant to change topic but curious on everyones implementations.

Personally, I'm waiting for NGINX + Redis support in enhance to use NGINX + FastCGI Cache, Redis/Relay/Dragonfly for Object Cache (Object Cache Pro Plugin) and then WP-Rocket since it's my usual go to, But also a fan of W3TC.

Right now it's OLS + LSCache until NGINX comes

ss88us

For now I am only using the Object Cache with Dragonfly across multiple websites using different cache keys, which is working great. Full page caching by Apache/Redis is not supported. I believe there is an Apache module but it has to be compiled into Apache first?

Any cache plugin that writes to .htaccess (for Apache) and then generates .html files is better than one that connects to PHP or any other in-between to serve data. Here is an example when the page is fully cached:

Best example
Apache -> show cache page

Worst example
Apache -> PHP communication -> Redis communication -> show cached page

Right now I am using WP Fastest Cache as this stores static .html files of the pages and serves them via .htaccess.

Once NGINX comes, for me this would be the preferred solution because reading from Redis memory is significantly faster than disk. In that scenario, even though NGINX must communicate with Redis, I would imagine the time spent doing that is negligible (although I am not 100% sure), i.e. NGINX -> Redis communication -> Serve cached page

I did try the Docket Cache WordPress plugin as well, but on my larger website I found that it was causing a significant slowdown and I am unsure why. Once I disabled the plugin, the website ran fast again. This plugin is a very good tool though for smaller websites as the speed was comparable to Redis.

digitalexpanse

I can give this a try, we specifically cater to high-traffic wordpress sites pushing millions of page views.

Internet > Cloudflare Enterprise (full page cache) > Litespeed Enterprise combined with LScache and Redis Object Cache. I'm curious to compare this and see if there is any notable difference.

AdamM

Redis/KeyDB/Dragonly is only used to cache database calls and reduce the load on the database, not for static files.
https://redis.io/docs/manual/client-side-caching/

To handle static files there is already a web server such as Apache, NGINX, LiteSpeed or even Caddy.

For me, the best solution is:
Powerful server with modern CPU and NVMe- LiteSpeed - CDN example Cloudflare/QUIC.cloud - MySQL/MariaDB - Redis
And all this is brought together by the LiteSpeed Cache plugin.

It's just that LiteSpeed seems to me to have been created primarily for WordPress and handles it very well. I don't think there is a better out-of-box solution and easy to configure.

Although, using Plesk and self-tuned NGINX cache earlier, a simple WordPress site was able to reach 20k requests/sec only for 4 cpu ARM

ss88us

NGINX has Redis cache modules and an SR Cache module. These allow NGINX to talk directly to Redis without communicating with PHP first to then further communicate with Redis. Once you configure NGINX to talk with Redis, you can store the output of a HTML page within a Redis value, thus serving a full-page cached version via NGINX and Redis only.

I'm not very familiar with LightSpeed however, if NGINX does this, my guess is that LiteSpeed may do full-page caching too.

AdamM

@"ss888us"
Have you tried running dragonfly in docker with more databases than the default 16? do you know how to do that?

fbaye

Not going to lie I think this method will result in database contamination, like shared Redis servers suffer from.

Unless each container has it's own service provider, this will end in tears I think.