Yeah, right. Not at all a troll.
I respect your work but you’re making yourself look bad here.
You appear to think he’s way off the mark technically so it should be easy to address his points, no?
Take for instance "but you're still going to be dropping performance on the floor vs other I/O models as you get into the 1000s of connections"
Notice how it was written in passive voice, without any references to personal or 3rd party experience, and with nebulous hand-wavy numbers which can literally mean anything ?
Well, he had to write it that way because he could not find any hard evidence to back it up anywhere, could he ?
Here's some "reasonably sounding" information for you: builtwith.com reports that one eighth of the 10k largest web properties run Varnish.
They would hardly do that, if performance "dropped on the floor" with "1000s of connections", would they ?
You know what an actual Varnish users commented about performance after deploying Varnish on one of the worlds largest news sites?
He made jokes about the servers being so bored that they were making grilled cheese sandwiches.
No that comment is classical trolling: Technically sounding bla-bla, based on random google results, but totally removed from the legitimate and relevant critiques actual Varnish users bring.
Why don't you refute the claims regarding IO models (event based vs threading) instead, engaging in a proper discussion?
That would also prevent the downvotes you are receiving.
And engaging in a debate about irelevant technical details applicability in Varnish, with a person who clearly has never actually run Varnish ?
I have better things to do on a saturday.
While much of the original comment was anecdotal the fact Fastly has extensively worked on custom subsystems for it is not wrong, correct?
Addressing why they had to (and the original comments speculation/accusation about that) would be helpful in clearing up any confusion.
The OP was absolutely too aggressive in his comment, so I understand why you’re very defensive.
There are difference between "running Varnish on your website", "running Varnish for your web-hotel customers" and "running Varnish for some of the biggest web-properties in the world" and software and organizations always mirror each other.
For instance Fastly does not run Varnish on Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD or ..., they run it on whatever version on Linux they decided on, and what ever brand and model of boxes they find optimal, and therefore they their own code and changes do not need to be portable and can be tuned with laser-like precision to their hardware and kernel they use.
Even if they threw their codebase up on github, I doubt very many organizations could or would use it, because it is chock full with interfaces to Fastlys business systems, encapsulates their network strategy, and God knows what. (Remember when Y! threw Inktomi over the fence ? Not terribly useful if you were not Y!, it took years to generalize it.)
And you will find the same situation, no matter which other major FOSS based organization you look at, Amazon, NetFlix, the pink-bit-pushers, FaceBook, Twitter, Google ...
You simply don't run a huge company on vanilla software, if nothing else because your geeks can not resist the temptation to improve and optimize it to ease their own jobs.
And just to stake the "Fastly vs. Varnish project" thing through the heart at the cross-roads: Fastly is a major sponsor of the Varnish Cache Project.
- The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
I've been doing web dev for over 15 years and this quote is pretty much how I would describe the web development scene.
I can merely try to open a dialogue about it. I can totally understand him being tired and irritated about criticism like this - running large, popular, OSS project sucks from that perspective