Step by step guide how to setup Lesti FPC on Nexcess Magento Hosting.
Nexcess offers a full range of Magento hosting options, starting from servers with Shared Resource, Dedicated Servers up to platform specialized for Magento Enterprise.
While packages have a bit higher price that can be easily compensate with quality of service that they provide and technical support which is familiar with Magento platform.
Most interesting thing are Redis Cache & Memcached features that are available even on sheared servers, SIP 200
is lowest package that include those two. So if you have SIP 200 or better package there is no reason why you wouldn’t use all resources that you have and speed up your site significantly.
To make things clear if you have very slow Magento site with bad code and lot of 3rd party modules than there is no trick that would help you. You should simply reconsider fixing those issues first before start any work on optimization and fine tuning.
First step would be to create ticket on Nexcess help-desk and ask them to to create a redis instance on your server for Magento. They usually recommend a combination of Redis for caching and memcached for sessions storage, to get these two often accessed things into memory instead of on disk for performance. Also they can set up a memcached instance for sessions and put those settings in local.xml as well.
Once you have everything setup connect via SSH and test Redis with this command:
redis-cli -ping
if all is good you will get PONG
To flush Redis you can use this command, be sure to replace customer_specific_name in stirng with your customer name:
redis-cli -s /var/tmp/redis-multi_customer_specific_name_cache.sock FLUSHALL
if all is good you will get message OK
Once we have all this set it is time to install Gordon Lesti fpc module (thank you very much Gordon for all your help), it can be downloaded from: https://github.com/GordonLesti/Lesti_Fpc
Unpack zip file and in configuration file:
\app\etc\modules\Lesti_Fpc.xml
change value for ‘active’ node from ‘true’ to ‘false’
From file ‘fpc.xml.sample’ create config faile that we will use ‘fpc.xml’ and open it in editor.
In same time open ‘local.xml’ file of your Magento, Nexcess support already added Redis configuration code into it.
Copy those settings in ‘fpc.xml’ file by replacing code that start with: < ! -- example for redis -- >
Save file with changes and proceed with installation of FPC module via FTP. Once all files are copied open module config file and change value for ‘active’ node from ‘false’ to ‘true’ to enable module. Login into Magento back-end and navigate to System->Configuration->System and under tab ‘Lesti FPC’ you will find module settings. If you are using RWD theme module will work with default settings, in case that you have custom theme some additional directions are needed.
After you complete setup go to System->Cache Managemnt and enable FPC caching, than you can test site speed using your favorite tool.
Cheers !