The usage of varnish, revisited

[Ingvar Hagelund]

Dump from my blog posting at http://ingvar.blog.linpro.no/

Ingvar



The usage of varnish, revisited

This is more or less a repost, with updated numbers.

Some months have passed, and it is time to run my poking scripts again, looking for sites that run Varnish. There is no deep magic here. I just parse the available top lists that I know of, and peek at the HTML headers of the sites that are listed. If there are subsites linked from the front page of the site, I scan them too. This means that twitter.com shows up, though Twitter only runs Varnish on its search site. Subsites with a Varnish match are shown in parenthesis in the results.

For the Nordic countries, I have found quite good lists, that is, upload result lists from the probably most visited media sites in the respective countries. Remember of course, that these are generally pay-to-be-included lists, and there may exist sites with far more hits than the ones listed.

For a global overview, I have used Alexa.

Now for the results. Varnish is sponsored by large Norwegian sites, so it is no big surprise that there are a lot of hits in Norway. Of the TNS Gallup top list, Varnish runs at 36 of the top 100 sites. That’s 3 up since my last probe.

For Denmark, I use FDIM’s list. From May, we are up from 3 to 11 sites in the top 100. For Finland, I use TNS’ numbers again. No changes there. For Sweden, I use the KIA Index list. I now probe the 200 top sites, so there are several more varnish sites on the list. In the top 100, we are up from 8 to 9.

For the Alexa’s World top 500 list, I have tweaked my filters a bit, and the list is up from 7 to 17 sites since my last probe in May. World Domination, here we come!

The whole World: Alexa's global top 500 list
Place  12 Varnish running on twitter.com (http://integratedsearch.twitter.com/search.html)
Place  47 Varnish running on photobucket.com (http://blog.photobucket.com/)
Place  90 Varnish running on mixi.jp (http://img.mixi.jp/static/css/basic/logout_quirks) (and others)
Place 101 Varnish running on weather.com (http://www.weather.com/) (weather.com)
Place 107 Varnish running on globo.com (globo.com) (http://www.globo.com/)
Place 111 Varnish running on ifeng.com (http://big5.ifeng.com/gate/big5/www)
Place 138 Varnish running on answers.com (http://www.answers.com/) (answers.com)
Place 170 Varnish running on orange.fr (http://r.orange.fr/r/Eorangepublicite)
Place 179 Varnish running on hulu.com (hulu.com)
Place 199 Varnish running on wikia.com (wikia.com)
Place 213 Varnish running on xinhuanet.com (http://big5.xinhuanet.com/gate/big5/www)
Place 290 Varnish running on people.com.cn (http://bbs1.people.com.cn/boardList) (and others)
Place 344 Varnish running on tuenti.com (http://estaticos1.tuenti.com/layout/web2/images/favicon)
Place 428 Varnish running on chinanews.com.cn (http://www.chinanews.com.cn/test/index_back_d.html) (and others)
Place 433 Varnish running on mercadolivre.com.br (http://veiculos.mercadolivre.com.br/) (and others)
Place 447 Varnish running on mercadolibre.com.mx (http://tendencias.mercadolibre.com.mx/) (and others)
Place 456 Varnish running on break.com (break.com)

In my last probe, I poked sites all over Europe. With a few exceptions, that was a bit less interesting. Global .com and .net sites tend to cover most of the top 100 entries, as I had only toolbar lists, and it’s not that spectacular that for example people in Serbia and Monte Negro are browsing Twitter, like the rest of the World does. So I have skipped other countries. If you know of any good top list for you country that is not toolbar based, please let me know.

All the gory details are available here: http://users.linpro.no/ingvar/varnish/stats-2010-01-18.txt

Other more or less worth mentioned sites that is reported to use Varnish but does not show up in my lists, may be Slashdot, WAT TV, The Pirate Bay, JDownloader, e.Republik, WOWwiki, Globo.com, PCWelt.de, BlackPlanet, funnyordie.com and n-tv.de, to name a few.