My experience with Varnish was when we tried to use it for something that had relatively complex caching rules. The config/VCL became spaghetti: attaching values to req and restarting the flow. This appeared to be the normal way to write VCL.<p>We ended up writing our own system, with our own high-concurrent LRU cache, that was more tightly coupled with our application servers (and thus able to figure out what the cache key should be). It ended up being trivial to then add things like ESI, purging, grace and saint mode.<p>Point being, since then, I've had a hard time seeing where Varnish fits between proxy_cache for simple url+query caching, and rolling your own.
Does anyone have a fairly basic varnish config that deals with a) non-www to www redirects, b) works with https certificates (with the Cloudfare config) , , c) allows CORS for fonts on cloudfront and d) switches off caching for all /admin pages?<p>Varnish has proven to be very hard to use with nginx in the above setup. Especially, trying to understand the ssl bit is getting to be really hard.<p>Can it also work with spdy?
Varnish left a sour taste in my mouth. We have used it on one of our high-traffic sites, and had some truly bizarre hard-to-reproduce problems with it.<p>The major bug it had was that it would work normally for hours, but then it would randomly let the flood of requests through basically killing our servers. It happened over and over and over again. We had multiple talented sysadmins look at it, and none of them could give us any explanation. The only solution was to restart it, and warm the cache all over again. We couldn't figure out what sets it off, it looked just so random.
Varnish and caching in general can be a complete mind-freak the first few times you experience it, however after working with it nearly daily for the last 3 years, I've come to love it. It has allowed me to scale a number of WordPress websites far beyond where they had business being (34mm UV/180mm PV per month on a handful of servers). Super excited to see them continuing to build in great features.
> If you are using Varnish Cache for business, consider attending the Varnish Summits<p>If anyone from Varnish AS is reading this (OP?), please consider having a Varnish Summit on the east coast of the US sometime.<p>Soon.<p>Please.
Two questions:
(1) Anyone use Varnish in front of Rails? Is it better to just set up some memcached and/or redis and let the app handle it?
(2) To deal with session-specific stuff, how common is it to render some common plain html views, then fill in the particulars with JS/Ajax? If you need to support no-JS (heaven forbid) do people use iframes?
Has anyone documented how to convert a 3.x config to 4.x config yet? The documentation on the site assumes a level of understanding of the internal workings I don't have.<p>I'm still running 3.x because they broke a bunch of stuff. I discovered this when I updated a couple of dev boxes and varnish stopped working.
We've been long vacillating on using Varnish to power our E-commerce store but from what we've read, Varnish is not a good solution in cases where cookies are part of most of web traffic. Is this true?
I had to click three links to discover what Varnish is. So either I'm dumb or blind either there is no single description of what the product does on the home page copy.
I love varnish announcements. Their messages seemingly have a 78% likelihood of being from the machines themselves.<p>And, frankly, I think the machines _are_ happy to make the announcement.