What is varnish? (Was: Please test varnish-2.1.0-2 for F-13)

[Ingvar Hagelund]

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
>