Micro-caching in Nginx for High Performance

In the vast, multi-layered subject area of web performance, server response time is an important metric. From a CMS standpoint, however, it is one of the most significant. Best practise recommends a 200ms or lower time-to-first-byte. For medium to high-traffic sites, server load is another vital statistic.

We were invited to talk about our learnings from optimising and hosting high-traffic sites such as Guiding Tech at the sixth edition of the Bangalore Site Speed Meetup.

Bangalore Site Speed Meetup 6^th Event on YouTube.

In this talk we go over caching as a broad performance strategy, before dive into micro-caching as a specific approach to handle loads of 10 to 100 concurrent requests per second. We cover the filter, storage, and invalidation implementations¹ of this caching strategy in Nginx. The talk concludes by comparing metrics of our caching strategy against a target of achieving sub-200ms TTFB response times for all visitors.

This talk is a newer revision of the Fortifying Craft CMS for High Traffic talk from 2019² which, as it says on the tin, was specifically tailored for Craft CMS based workflows. In this edition we focus on just micro-caching as a strategy and look at it independent of any specific CMS running at the application layer.