---
title: "Response times with and without varnish"
date: "2013-06-14"
path: "/145-response-times-with-and-without-varnish.html"
section: "/ramblings"
aliases:
  - "/145"
  - "/145-response-times-with-and-without-varnish"
  - "/145.html"
  - "/ramblings/145-response-times-with-and-without-varnish.html"
---

We were recently asked to migrate a client running a Magento store on a complex infrastructure which utilised a varnish caching proxy, to a system that didn’t have varnish to reduce management costs (amongst other things).

The slowdown you can easily see in the response time from the server as reported by Pingdom:

![](/images/magevarnish.png)

Despite the drop in response time, the resulting high-powered non-varnished based standard apache delivered site actually ran very quick, and in some cases outperformed the SSD based server in index rebuilds for example – that’ll be the 6 virtual CPU’s and the 28Gb of RAM.