Varnish-cache summer 2012 status report

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

It's time for a quick status report from the Varnish project:


Varnish User Group meeting #6
-----------------------------

Will happen with the Velocity Conference in London in early
October:

	https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VUG6


New York Varnish Cache User Group
---------------------------------

New York have their own Varnish User Group now, and they're meeting
on the 26'th of june:

	http://www.meetup.com/NYC-Varnish/


The Varnish Book
----------------

Varnish Software has released "The Varnish Book", a work in progress
based on their course materials:

	https://www.varnish-software.com/static/book/


1 Mreq/s
--------

A very anguished Varnish-user reports to have broken the 1Mreq/s
barrier in internal benchmarking, but corporate lawyers will not
allow them to brag about it in public.

But that raises the obvious question: who _will_ be first to brag
about it in public ?


HTTP/2.0
--------

IETF has chartered the HTTPbis working group to come up with HTTP/2.0
and there is a significant pressure to rubber stamp some version of
SPDY, others, me included, think that SPDY is far too shortsighted,
but whatever happens, Varnish will be there.

The main change for Varnish will not be a different protocol, but
that we may process multiple requests for the same session at one
time.  The opposite is a quite fundamental assumption in Varnish
(see for instance how we use "struct sess" pointers) so we have
some way to go, but starting early will get us there in time.


Streaming fetches
-----------------

After a false start, we are now on track with this.  This also
forces a pretty big interior redecoration exercise in the source
code, but it looks like it all turned out for the better and more
understandable.  After some funding paperwork hiccups, the last
part is now on track.


I-M-S/Conditional fetch
-----------------------

As soon as streaming fetches is done, I'll integrate Geoff's
conditional fetch patches also.


Persistent
----------

Martin has picked up -spersistent and will try to push it to be
more production-ready.   As you might have gathered, -spersistent
is actually pretty tricky, somewhere between a database and a
filesystem, so by all means help Martin test out his patches:

	https://github.com/mbgrydeland/varnish-cache


Funding
-------

As long as companies also pay the invoices they have asked me to
send to them, I should have plenty of time to hack Varnish:

	http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/index.html

And also many thanks to the people/companies who sent me stuff
from my Amazon Wish-list:

	https://www.amazon.com/registry/wishlist/1XSZNDWXKIAS0


And that's it: Have a nice summer

phk

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.