What is Varnish?
Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.
Varnish is a tool in the Web Cache category of a tech stack.
Varnish is an open source tool with 891 GitHub stars and 204 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Varnish's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Varnish?
Companies
9325 companies reportedly use Varnish in their tech stacks, including Pinterest, Udemy, and Twitch.
Developers
2906 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Varnish.
Varnish Integrations
Datadog, Netdata, SignalFx, Blackfire.io, and Section are some of the popular tools that integrate with Varnish. Here's a list of all 9 tools that integrate with Varnish.
Pros of Varnish
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Decisions about Varnish
Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Varnish in their tech stack.
Vikrant L
Existing configuration is like we have 100 local expensive Docker pod based decryptions (in=encrypted, out-=decrypted).
To reduce the load, 8 Varnish baremetals are used in between the client and the dockers. The varnish is dropping in performance if the connection count to it increases.'
-- the client C code is also integrated with Memcached for other types of data.
What would be my steps to compare Varnish vs Memcache?
- TTL is 12 hours
- qps is 500kqps across all varnish
- connection count to each varnish server is 360000
- size of data per query is 5k to 14k
thanks all!
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Varnish's Features
- Powerful, feature-rich web cache
- HTTP accelerator
- Speed up the performance of your website and streaming services
Varnish Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Varnish?
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
HAProxy
HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.
Apache Traffic Server
It is a fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0 compliant caching proxy server.Improve your response time, while reducing server load and bandwidth needs by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages, images, and web ser
Squid
Squid reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.
