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