Table of contents
Varnish
High-performance HTTP accelerator.
As Varnish is an open source project, you can find more
open source alternatives and stats
on LibHunt.
Caching Efficiency
Varnish is highly efficient at caching, which significantly reduces the load on the web server by serving cached content quickly, improving response times for users.
Flexibility with VCL
Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) allows for flexible and powerful configurations, enabling users to customize caching policies and behaviors to meet specific needs.
High Performance
Varnish is designed to handle a large number of requests per second, making it suitable for high-traffic websites seeking to improve their performance and scalability.
HTTP Support
Varnish supports HTTP/1.1 and can be configured to work with HTTP/2, effectively caching HTTP protocol responses and requests.
Grace Mode
Grace Mode is a feature in Varnish that allows serving stale content while fetching fresh content from the server, minimizing downtime during backend failures.
Varnish is an excellent choice for organizations seeking to optimize web performance, particularly when dealing with high traffic or expensive backend operations. Its ability to deliver cached content quickly enhances user experience and optimizes resource use.
We have collected here some useful links to help you find out if Varnish is good.
Check the traffic stats of Varnish on SimilarWeb. The key metrics to look for are: monthly visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, and traffic by country. Moreoever, check the traffic sources. For example "Direct" traffic is a good sign.
Check the "Domain Rating" of Varnish on Ahrefs. The domain rating is a measure of the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. It shows the strength of Varnish's backlink profile compared to the other websites. In most cases a domain rating of 60+ is considered good and 70+ is considered very good.
Check the "Domain Authority" of Varnish on MOZ. A website's domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is based on a 100-point logarithmic scale, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. This is another useful metric to check if a website is good.
The latest comments about Varnish on Reddit. This can help you find out how popualr the product is and what people think about it.
Caching helps minimize backend strain, reduce delays, and handle more requests, which translates to better scalability, smoother user interactions, and smarter resource use. Tools like Redis and Varnish have shown impressive results in high-demand API setups [1]. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
Varnish Cache — A web application accelerator that serves as an intermediary between web clients and servers. It provides logging, request inspection, authentication and authorization, and throttling. Varnish can also enhance security as a web application firewall, hotlinking protector, and DDoS attack defense tool. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
Varnish Cache is a tool that provides a caching HTTP reverse proxy in order to accelerate your web applications. Once Varnish Cache is installed in front of any server that understands HTTP and configured to cache the contents, delivery speeds are typically enhanced by a factor of 300-1000x, depending on architecture. Kilobyte22 finds this tool along with HAProxy to be a winning combo. Source: over 2 years ago
In this case, caching mechanism is situated in the proxy server or reverse proxy server like Nginx, Apache, or Varnish, and most probably it is a part of ISP (Internet Service Provider). - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
To handle this level of traffic, you can use tools such as Varnish HTTP Cache, which caches the information of a news article starting from the first user who accesses and makes the request. Once Varnish caches the page, subsequent users will receive a response that is saved in memory. This process allows you to avoid unnecessary synchronous requests and send a quick response to users. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
A couple of dedicated server-side resource caching solutions have emerged over the years: Memcached, Varnish, Squid, etc. Other solutions are less focused on web resource caching and more generic, e.g., Redis or Hazelcast. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
Edge Side Includes (ESI): a more modern alternative to SSI. ESI can handle variables, have conditionals, and supports better error handling. ESI is supported by caching HTTP servers such as Varnish. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
For this objective, I am looking for willing volunteers to run through two phases of test deployments. These phases will each involve creating a scalable Varnish Cache cluster on Azure Kubernetes Service and answering a few questions about your experience. The deployments should take a total of around 30 min (or less) and will require the creation of a very minimal Kubernetes cluster. For some more information on... Source: about 3 years ago
For reads, caches are the primary tool, such as Varnish or memcached. Source: over 3 years ago
Others have pointed out some very valid issues. A quick hack, try using Varnish Cache (https://varnish-cache.org/), you can really accelerate the static content delivery. Source: over 3 years ago
In this case, caching mechanism is situated in the proxy server or reverse proxy server like Nginx, Apache, or Varnish, and most probably it is a part of ISP (Internet Service Provider). - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
It sucks when this happens, but it's easily avoidable by using a caching frontend of some sort. My favorite is Varnish,[0] which I have used with great success for _many_ web sites throughout the years. Even a web site that 10+ millions of requests per day ran from a single web server for a long time a decade-ish ago. [0] https://varnish-cache.org/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago
> Is there some document somewhere that goes over the choices, overlaps, etc? I believe Apache Traffic Server doesn't really compete with the likes of nginx or traefik. Apache Traffic Server is a HTTP caching server/web accelerator, thus it's specialized for caching HTTP requests and consequently it's simpler to deploy and configure. With that in mind, it competes with the likes of Squid[1] or Varnish[2].... - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago
You need to be using Varnish Cache for the Varnish Cache plugin to do anything. Source: about 4 years ago
If performance is your concern, check out https://varnish-cache.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 4 years ago
We have choices. We could use Varnish (scripting! Edge side includes! PHK blog posts!). We could use Apache Traffic Server (being the only new team this year to use ATS!). Or we could use NGINX (we're already running it!). The only certainty is that you'll come to hate whichever one you pick. Try them all and pick the one you hate the least. - Source: dev.to / over 4 years ago
It's a change in Fastly's fork of Varnish, which has it spelled correctly. Source: over 4 years ago
If you're worried about performance then put a cache in front of your server (such as https://varnish-cache.org/), and focus on providing validators in your representation metadata (etag, last-modified) to improve cache hits. This is going to give you much more improvement than tinkering with the ordering of these steps. Source: over 4 years ago
Do you know an article comparing Varnish to other products?
Suggest a link to a post with product alternatives.
Is Varnish good? This is an informative page that will help you find out. Moreover, you can review and discuss Varnish here. The primary details have not been verified within the last quarter, and they might be outdated. If you think we are missing something, please use the means on this page to comment or suggest changes. All reviews and comments are highly encouranged and appreciated as they help everyone in the community to make an informed choice. Please always be kind and objective when evaluating a product and sharing your opinion.
