Suppose you’re setting up a Drupal-based site for which you have to implement a caching reverse proxy and for reasons beyond your comprehension Varnish (or even Squid) are not an option. Oh no, you’re stuck with Apache’s mod_proxy and mod_cache! What should you do?
First of all, Drupal 6 doesn’t like reverse proxies. If you don’t want to wait for version 7, which should do better in this respect, you might want to look at Pressflow. This Drupal 6 “distro” has everything on board to work with reverse proxies. So install Pressflow (or try to apply this out of date diff to stock Drupal) and in the Performance-screen set “Caching Mode” to “External” and “Page Cache Maximum Age” to the number of minutes you consider a cached page valid. Voila, you’re done in Drupal (edit: almost, as you might also want to change the $base_url in sites/default/settings.php to reverse proxy URL after you configured Apache).
Next up: Apache! A simple configuration like this one should do the trick:
ProxyRequests Off ProxyPass /rp_drupal http://localhost/pressflow ProxyPassReverse /rp_drupal http://localhost/pressflow CacheEnable disk /rp_drupal/ CacheRoot c:/TEMP/apacache CacheDefaultExpire 3600
OK, this must surely work, no? Well it should, but it doesn’t! When setting your Apache-loglevel to debug you’ll see “not cached” entries in your error-log, with the following reason:
Expires header already expired, not cacheable
Expires in the past, what does Pressflow think it’s doing deep down in includes/bootstrap.inc?
// HTTP/1.0 proxies do not support the Vary header, so prevent any caching // by sending an Expires date in the past. HTTP/1.1 clients ignores the // Expires header if a Cache-Control: max-age= directive is specified (see RFC // 2616, section 14.9.3). drupal_set_header('Expires', 'Sun, 11 Mar 1984 12:00:00 GMT'); // [...] $max_age = variable_get('cache', CACHE_DISABLED) == CACHE_AGGRESSIVE && (!isset($_COOKIE[session_name()]) || isset($hook_boot_headers['vary'])) ? variable_get('page_cache_max_age', 0) : 0; $default_headers['Cache-Control'] = 'public, max-age=' . $max_age;
Darn, those Pressflow-guys seem to have read up on their RFC’s! And indeed, 2616 confirms that cache-control’s max-age overrules expires;
If a response includes both an Expires header and a max-age directive, the max-age directive overrides the Expires header, even if the Expires header is more restrictive. This rule allows an origin server to provide, for a given response, a longer expiration time to an HTTP/1.1 (or later) cache than to an HTTP/1.0 cache.
Mod_cache’s code seems to take a much simpler approach; at line 503 it decides not to cache based on an Expires-header in the past, totally dismissing the potential presence of cache-control’s max-age.
else if (exp != APR_DATE_BAD && exp < r->request_time) { /* if a Expires header is in the past, don't cache it */ reason = "Expires header already expired, not cacheable"; }
But you’re not interested in code which does or does not adhere to whatever RFC some spec-buffs came up with, you just want to cache your frigging’ Drupal-site! Well, fear not little hacker-boy, here’s some Apache-magic to cure your ailments, to be copy/pasted in the config before ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse:
<Location /rp_drupal> SetEnvIf Request_Protocol "HTTP/1.1" expires_overrule # homework: add a SetEnvIf to see if cache-control max-age is present Header unset Expires env=expires_overrule </Location>
So there you have it, a rudimentary caching setup for Drupal (in the guise of Pressflow) using nothing but Apache’s mod_proxy and mod_cache. Now go do your homework and test and do some finetuning and test some more. Happy caching!
I’m not really into Apache on Windows, but if runs in some kind of prefork mode -like it does on Linux if you use PHP- the performance won’t be impressive. Did you test the setup with ab? I recommend to cache in memory and/or use Varnish if you want it FAST. 🙂
If you want to cache on disk instead of in memory, you might want to try Boost: http://drupal.org/project/boost The module will cache your Drupal pages in static files (without reverse proxy). I didn’t try it myself, but it will probably be less tricky than the reverse proxy setup.
well, varnish wasn’t an option (neither was squid for that matter) and boost isn’t a reverse proxy (which we needed), so that leaves us with little choice. a pity we can’t use varnish though, that’s true.
oh cool! Thanks frank is Common.
Thanks, I just found out with the help of this article that we need “Maximum Age”, not “Minimum Age” for the max-age header to be present. The wording on the Drupal performance page is a bit confusing.