Tell HN: Have a look at Varnish

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1607233

by eisokant • 16 years ago

26 23 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hey Everyone!

I just wanted to share with you the link to an incredible HTTP accelerator: http://varnish-cache.org/

We've been testing a lot of different stacks for our startup (Tyba) and using NGINX (behind) + Varnish (upfront) has allowed us to go from 9 reqs/sec (loading a Wordpress site) to 2500 reqs/sec.

I know it's not a novelty but I wanted to share it in the hope it helps the few people who don't know about it.

Kind regards,

Eiso

d_r• 16 years ago

More context on why Varnish is superior to Squid: http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/ArchitectNotes

jakevoytko• 16 years ago

This article should be required reading for anyone building programs with massive memory consumption!

To give some context, this describes how Varnish combines mmapping with a nice memory partitioning scheme to get free caching from the OS, instead of fighting the OS' tendency to cache and managing it yourself.

sgt• 16 years ago

Varnish = reverse proxy Squid = forwarding proxy

ggbaker• 16 years ago

Squid can also be used as a reverse proxy, so it is a reasonable competitor to Varnish. (As is Apache mod_proxy.)

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Agreed, varnish is awesome, we use it on a home-brew CDN and it has been a fantastic experience so far.

Also, the guy that wrote it (Poul Henning-Kamp) is very responsive when it comes to answering questions or fixing issues, they have an IRC channel at #varnish on irc.linpro.no.

Definitely a piece of software worth looking in to when your website gets bigger.

Andys• 16 years ago

PHK has a history of smash hits; he is responsible for much of the work on FreeBSD's container-based virtualisation (jails), modular disk device framework (Geom), & disk encryption (gbde).

jessor• 16 years ago

Agreed, nginx+varnish (optionally on top of an existing apache setup) seems to be best practice right now for heavy traffic sites.

piotrSikora4• 16 years ago

This might be most popular setup right now, but I wouldn't consider it the best practice. Why in the world would you use both nginx and varnish?

zepolen4• 16 years ago

Because until 0.7 nginx lacked a caching system, and so it made sense to use both. Now it doesn't.

moe2• 16 years ago

Because varnish is more flexible (VCL) and more time tested.

It's also likely[1] faster and more well behaved under high loads, simply because it has been around for much longer and seen more tuning in large deployments.

[1] Disclaimer: I haven't benchmarked them against one another, that's merely my common-sense assessment.

zepolen4• 16 years ago

Why would Varnish be required in that situation if you're already running nginx which is perfectly capable of caching a simple wordpress site in the same manner.

StavrosK• 16 years ago

I don't think it's required, but, really, why wouldn't you be running varnish? It's just amazing.

piotrSikora4• 16 years ago

Because it doesn't add anything useful to the mix - nginx's cache works just fine.

DavidPP• 16 years ago

For people who want to use NGINX caching on top of Apache/Wordpress, I found out this tutorial : http://www.myatus.co.uk/2010/06/28/a-simplified-nginx-apache...

japanesejay• 16 years ago

Thanks for sharing! We've built a drupal powered site using Varnish as well. With a few tweaks, our initial tests showed ~3000 req/sec! Good stuff!

Tell HN: Have a look at Varnish

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