Varnish for Joomla maintenance release

It seems that with Joomla! 3.4.3, our patch for Varnish support could not be applied, so we made a maintenance release - as usually, available for free for the existing clients. There are no new features, so you won't need it unless you're planning to upgrade to Joomla! 3.4.3 or later.

Varnish for Joomla! 3.4

The latest Varnish Cache package for Joomla! v1.3.5 is available. Now you can accelerate Joomla CMS version 3.4.
Existing clients can contact us to get the new version for free.
If you're running a high traffic website and don't want to lose clients to downtime, perhaps we can interest you in our inexpensive server monitoring services?

Patch for 3.3.1

Joomla! 3.3.1 changed some of the patched code, so the patches from 3.3.0 won't work with 3.3.1. Existing users need to ask for the new version (for free, as usually).

Varnish for Joomla! 3.3

The Varnish-Joomla pack has been upgraded to support Joomla! 3.3 which has been released last week. Existing clients are eligible for a free upgrade after contacting us.

Originally we planned this release to support Varnish 4 which has been released two weeks ago, but it was more work than expected and clients were more interested in Joomla 3.3 support.

Varnish 4 doesn't bring any significant performance gains for small-to-middle sized web sites, it has separate backend and frontend processing threads, which could be better in certain high-traffic scenarios. It looks like this release was more focused on cleaning up the Varnish Configuration Language and bringing log analysis features (which are awesome, by the way).

Joomla 1.0 spam

This news comes from our secure Joomla 1.0 hosting department. Recently some of our Joomla 1.0 sites became sources of spam. Apparently somebody (with a narrow range of IP addresses geolocating to Malaysia) has found a security problem in VirtueMart recommendation module which allows them to send emails with POST requests.
The solution was to paste the following code into Apache configuration (or .htaccess):
# vm spam patch
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*(page=shop\.recommend).* [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F,L]


If you're fed up dealing with lack of security in old Joomla versions, give us a shot. We run Joomla on latest Apache, PHP and MySQL versions, keep a month worth of backups and have several security measures.

Varnish-Joomla Pack 1.3.1 with Joomla 3.2 support is out

New features:

• Support for Joomla! 3.2
• Support for HikaShop

Joomla! 3.2 support has been tested with core components and the following extensions:

• JomSocial
• Akeeba Backup
• Admin Tools
• Kunena Forum
• Community Builder
• HikaShop

Virtuemart does not support 3.2 (and never will), and that's the only reason why it's not included in the test. We continue to support it. As explained here, the patch for Joomla! 3.2 does not prevent creating new sessions for anonymous users. If you have a lot of cache misses caused by anonymous users, there will be an extra disk write operation per cache miss - if this concerns you, move your sessions to memcached or XCache.

Upgrade from 1.3.0 and 1.2.2: Just replace the default.vcl file. As always, the upgrade is free for existing users.

New users - order to speed up your Joomla! and its extensions.

Varnish for Joomla! 3.2 on its way

Varnish for Joomla 3.2 will be released next week. The plan was to release it this week, but Joomla 3.2 increased its dependence on sessions and the patch can not operate the same way it did before.
In previous versions, we did what we could to not even create sessions in the database, thus lowering the number of disk writes required to serve users' requests. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it's possible any more and the best we can do is not sending session cookies to the user.
This is a new approach and while it passes all internal tests against a vanilla Joomla install, it needs more testing with supported 3rd party components.
I'm sorry for the delay, we got many requests about 3.2 availability in the past two weeks.

Varnish-Joomla package 1.3.0 released, with cache purging

The new Varnish-Joomla package 1.3.0 is now available. New features include:

• Purging cache when saving articles
• Support for more Joomla! extensions and static file types
• Improved cache hit rate because of Accept-Encoding normalization
• Support for Piwik and CloudFlare
• More debugging headers

The biggest news is cache purging - this means that the moment you save your article, it is visible to your visitors. Behind the curtains, our Joomla plugin connects to your Varnish and tells it to remove cached copies of the saved page, pages of categories it belongs to, and the front page. This feature is optional, you don't need to install the plugin if this is not the desired behavior.

The package has support for Joomla 2.5.4+, 3.0.x and 3.1.x, just like the previous version.

There is good news for our existing customers: the patch to Joomla core didn't change, all features are implemented with the Varnish VCL file and an easily installable Joomla plugin.

As usually, the upgrade is free, contact us to receive the latest package if you've already purchased it.

Make Joomla's Nextend Menu faster

If you're using Nextend's Accordion Menu for Joomla, there's a good chance it's slowing you down. Adding this simple patch to make it use cache cut down average loading time by 900 ms on a Joomla 2.5 site.

• Open libraries/nextend/accordionmenu/treebase.php
• Find the following part:

        $this->renderItem();

    }

    

    function renderItem() {

• Replace it with:

        $cache = & JFactory::getCache();

        $cache->call(array($this, 'renderItem'), JURI::getInstance()->toString());

    }

    

    function renderItem($dummy=NULL) {

Varnish-Joomla patch version 1.2.2 released

A new version of Varnish-Joomla patch is available. The most interesting news is Joomla! 3.1 support.

Other than that, patches for Joomla! 2.5 and 3.0 have been updated to the latest version of their respective families (2.5.11 and 3.0.4).

A bug pointed by Yves Lavoie has been fixed too. It could make the patched system error out in some rare circumstances.

If you're an existing customer, contact us to get the latest package.

If you're interested in purchasing the patch, please head to Order section of the product page: make your Joomla! faster

Varnish integration for Joomla! 3.0

A version of our Varnish-Joomla integration for Joomla! 3.0 is ready. It doesn't bring any significant updates to older Joomla! versions. The upgrade is free for customers who ordered an older version of this patch.

Varnish is a website accelerator which can help you handle hundreds of requests per second on your Joomla! site.

vztop in vzprocps: fixed

There has been a frequently encountered problem with vztop on OpenVZ making the tool totally useless - it worked perfectly except for it didn't show virtual machine IDs for processes. Instead of actual numerical ID, it showed "N/A" in the VEID column.

So I spent an hour or so debugging, and it turned out that vztop, when requested to show the VEID column, didn't set a flag which enabled collection of VEIDs and other data. While diving into vzprocps source, I also made vztop show VEID by default. The result is this simple patch against vzprocps 2.0.11-2.

Apply with patch -p1 <vztop_veid.txt

If you need to debug a problem with some piece of software, I'm for hire at Massive Scale. I have never seen vzprocps source code before and still the solution was available in just 1 hour of work. That's $70. Would your $15/h programmer solve the problem as efficiently?