Ryan Tomayko

Installing Varnish with nginx, Passenger, and Monit on Ubuntu 8.10 intrepid —

Nice stack.

Slides from Stefan Tilkov's HTTP Caching talk @ JAOO —

Warning: PDF. This is probably the best high-level, everything about HTTP caching all in one place resource on the web at this point. Good stuff. I’m kicking myself for not being a part of his track at JAOO now.

What to Look For in a HTTP Proxy/Cache —

mnot on how to evaluate different proxy cache options for your needs.

Twitter's Varnish config —

John Adams posted a bunch of details of the Varnish configuration they use in front of search.twitter.com to the varnish ML. Great stuff and nice to see the Twitter devs continuing to share their experiences with the community.

Varnish's ESI Support —

“Varnish implementes a subset of the ESI Language 1.0 defined by W3C, this document lays out some of the thoughts and rationale for choices made and advice for usage of these features.”

This lets you perform includes at the cache layer so that each included resource can have its own caching policy. Akamai edge proxies have supported this for some time, apparently.

Varnish 2.0 released! —

Looks like a really solid improvement on 1.0. I haven’t had a chance to play with any of the betas but I’m anxious to see whether If-Modified-Since/If-None-Match validation made it in. There’s a note on “serving expired objects until we have a fresh one” but that sounds more like stale-while-revalidate.

Varnish 2.0 beta 2 released —

Lots of good stuff coming in Varnish 2.0. GC, regexp based purge, custom hash funcs, backend load balancing based on health or other metrics, and the thing I’m personally most interested: what looks like support for validation based caching.

ArchitectNotes - Varnish —

“I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975.”