What is varnish? (Was: Please test varnish-2.1.0-2 for F-13)
Ingvar Hagelund
ingvar at redpill-linpro.com
Mon Apr 19 09:43:55 UTC 2010
I was asked to give a short description of what varnish is.
Varnish is a state of the art, high performance http accellerator. Think
squid in reverse caching mode, but powered by the dark side of the
force, on steroids*.
Varnish is Free Software, available under the BSD license.
Some highlights
- A modern design, using advanced features in Linux 2.6, FreeBSD 6/7
and OpenSolaris
- A very flexible compiled configuration language
- Load balancing with health checking of backends
- Partial support for ESI
- URL rewriting
- Graceful handling of "dead" backends
- Live statistics and logging
Varnish is used to accellerate well-known sites like Slashdot, Wikia and
Twitter, to name a few.
More info at http://www.varnish-cache.org/
Please consider testing varnish-2.1.0-2.fc13 for F-13, see below.
Ingvar
*) Real life cases has shown one varnish instance out-performing a
cluster of 12 squid boxes.
* Ingvar Hagelund:
> I think it's important that varnish-2.1.0-2.fc13 is included in F-13,
> and hope that it's not too late.
>
> It was submitted by bodhi today, and can also be downloaded from koji.
>
> Please test the update and give feedback through bodhi.
>
>
> Snipped from the bodhi update request:
>
> Details
> Upgrade to new upstream release 2.1.0. This upgrade is important
> because
>
> * The previous 2.0 series will be discontinued within the
> lifetime of F-13
>
> * 2.1.0 contains a fix for CVE-2009-2936. It is not
> probably that upstream will backport this fix for the
> 2.0 series
>
>
> These changes should be important enough to include
> varnish-2.1.x in F-13, even after the freeze.
>
>
> Ingvar
>
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