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14 posts tagged “varnish”

2025

I thought I had an verbal agreement with them, that “Varnish Cache” was the FOSS project and “Varnish Software” was the commercial entitity, but the current position of Varnish Software’s IP-lawyers is that nobody can use “Varnish Cache” in any context, without their explicit permission. [...]

We have tried to negotiatiate with Varnish Software for many months about this issue, but their IP-Lawyers still insist that Varnish Software owns the Varnish Cache name, and at most we have being offered a strictly limited, subject to their veto, permission for the FOSS project to use the “Varnish Cache” name.

We cannot live with that: We are independent FOSS project with our own name.

So we will change the name of the project.

The new association and the new project will be named “The Vinyl Cache Project”, and this release 8.0.0, will be the last under the “Varnish Cache” name.

Poul-Henning Kamp, Varnish 8.0.0 release notes

# 15th September 2025, 9:03 pm / copyright, open-source, varnish

2024

Weeknotes: Page caching and custom templates for Datasette Cloud

My main development focus this week has been adding public page caching to Datasette Cloud, and exploring what custom template support might look like for that service.

[... 924 words]

2017

nginx proxy-cache-lock (via) Crucially important feature hidden away in the nginx documentation: proxy_cache_lock enables request coalescing, or dog-pile protection: it means that if a hundred simultaneous requests all suffer the same cache miss, only one request is made to the backend and the answer is then sent back to all hundred requests at once. I’ve leaned heavily on this feature in Varnish for years—useful to know that nginx has the same capability.

# 14th November 2017, 9:53 pm / caching, dogpile, nginx, varnish

2013

What are some tips on scaling a startup once you get massive news coverage?

It’s pretty rare for press coverage to drive large amounts of traffic—even if you get stories on a bunch of big news site you’re very unlikely to see a traffic spike of more than 20-30 hits a second, which most reasonably well built web applications should be able to handle.

[... 160 words]

2012

Scalability: What is the best way to store and serve hundreds of GB of images for a heavy traffic website?

If you’re not going to use a service like S3, your best bet is to run something like MogileFS (which was designed by LiveJournal for handling images) and stick Varnish (a screamingly fast HTTP caching server) in front of it.

[... 66 words]

2011

Display your events on your own website with Lanyrd Badges. We’ve launched badges for Lanyrd—JavaScript that lets you embed a top bar or a content “splat” showing events you plan to attend, talks you’ve given in the past and other various combinations. I’m quite pleased with the implementation—the badges are configured using classes on a link to your Lanyrd profile, and the badges themselves are served through a combination of Amazon CloudFront for the initial script and a Varnish cache for the badge data itself to keep things nice and snappy.

# 13th January 2011, 8:38 pm / badges, caching, cloudfront, javascript, varnish, lanyrd, recovered

2010

Why toppcloud will not be agnostic. Ian Bicking’s toppcloud aims to offer deployment with the ease of use of AppEngine against a standard, open source Ubuntu + Python 2.6 + mod_wsgi + Varnish stack. Here he explains why he’s not going to vary the required components: keeping everything completely standardised means everyone gets the same bugs (and the same fixes).

# 12th February 2010, 9:21 am / appengine, deployment, django, ian-bicking, modwsgi, python, toppcloud, ubuntu, varnish, wsgi

2009

Traffic Server. Mark Nottingham explains the release of Traffic Server, a new Apache Incubator open source project donated by Yahoo! using code originally developed at Inktomi around a decade ago. Traffic Server is a HTTP proxy/cache, similar to Squid and Varnish (though Traffic Server acts as both a forward and reverse proxy, whereas Varnish only handles reverse).

# 1st November 2009, 12:15 pm / apache, cache, http, inktomi, mark-nottingham, open-source, proxy, squid, trafficserver, varnish, yahoo

High-end Varnish-tuning. Tuning the Varnish HTTP cache to serve 27K requests/second on a single core 2.2GHz Opteron.

# 20th October 2009, 9:25 am / caching, http, performance, varnish

Yahoo! proposal to open source “Traffic Server” via the ASF. Traffic Server is a “fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server” (presumably equivalent to things like Squid and Varnish) originally acquired from Inktomi and developed internally at Yahoo! for the past three years, which has been benchmarked handling 35,000 req/s on a single box. No source code yet but it looks like the release will arrive pretty soon.

# 7th July 2009, 12:37 pm / apache, asf, caching, open-source, proxy, squid, trafficserver, varnish, yahoo

Installing Django, Solr, Varnish and Supervisord with Buildout. Useful, detailed instructions... but I still think this stuff is Way Too Difficult at the moment. I’m a big fan of the idea of sites that are assembled from multiple smaller web services talking HTTP to each other, but ensuring all the moving parts stay running is massively more painful than just running Apache and MySQL.

# 7th June 2009, 1:54 pm / apache, bertrand-mathieu, buildout, django, mysql, operations, python, rest, solr, supervisord, sysadmin, varnish

How search.twitter.com uses Varnish. Includes examples of the configuration options they use.

# 2nd March 2009, 5:08 pm / caching, search, twitter, varnish

2008

so-you-wanna-see-an-image (via) WordPress.com use Amazon S3 to store images (presumably to save having to create a massive scalable redundant filesystem themselves) but the images are served via a load balanced memcached / varnishd caching system that they control.

# 1st May 2008, 10:13 am / amazon-s3, caching, memcached, s3, varnish, wordpresscom

2007

Just what web server should be sitting in front of my Rails application? Includes some interesting notes about Varnish, PHK’s high performance, highly configurable front-end caching server (essentially a much more modern version of Squid).

# 17th July 2007, 1:29 pm / jason-hoffman, joyent, nginx, phk, rails, squid, varnish