A Practical Guide To Varnish - Why Varnish Matters

highscalability.com

9 pointsjerhinesmith4 comments

Here's the thing - Varnish is cool. Well made, purpose built - a great tool.

But I can't help but think that in quite a few cases, people are jumping to it to compensate for a lack of proper engineering at the application level. Rails likes to add timestamps so things won't cache? WHY are you caching them then? Change the behaviour of rails for goodness sake.

This may be because Varnish gets deployed by a different person/team than those writing the apps - the web-turned-php developers can get sloppy and a decent frontend engineer can speed things up again by tossing varnish in front and fixing things up (which is a very common situation in my experience).

Certainly varnish can compensate for a wide variety of problems.. but it's also one more thing to go wrong.

Probably, but since there are similar commercial tools on the market (F5 WebAccelerator, for example), such a product is always welcomed.

Thank god, an app server with an imperative configuration file! Bliss! Declarative languages are not meant for programmers.

Upvoted assuming you're being sarcastic :)

Seriously, I'd love to hear how easy a varnish setup is to debug. Apache rewrite rules are imperative as well, just not obviously so.

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