Just listened to Artur railing against squid and preaching the virtues of varnish. He quoted what most people quoted, which is how varnish performs serving out of *memory*.
It must be nice to have a working set that small. Until someone can show me numbers of disk-intensive (meaning, full caches, LRU eviction churning all the time) varnish numbers, then squid does us quite fine.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Kevin Murphy // Jun 24, 2008 at 7:06 pm
There will always be people who will love things because they are beautiful, not because they work. Varnish is conceptually cleaner than Squid, but currently less reliable and useful for fewer workloads.
If people love it enough for its beauty, perhaps someday it will work.
2 Mark Nottingham // Jun 25, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Exactly. Varnish is fast, but considering that Squid can saturate a gigE from memory with around 10k responses, it’s only a big deal if your response size is considerably less than that.
I’d take Squid’s stability and features over VCL and Varnish’s lack of documentation any day. IMO they should position Varnish as a bespoke intermediary construction toolkit, not as a “HTTP cache” or even reverse proxy.
BTW, according to the list recently, Varnish buffers responses from the origin until they’re complete; it doesn’t stream them to the server. Ouch.
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