Remote backend servers

[Nathan Kinkade]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 05:58, Audun Ytterdal <audun at ytterdal.net> wrote:
> We do this for as a layer in front of remote API calls to 3rd party
> providers (mostly to be able to terminate long running serverside queries.
> Php is notoriously bad at timeouts. Works like a charm.

We don't do this on a permanent basis, but on a number of occasions we
have, when moving a service from one machine to another remote one.
We set up the service on the new machine, sync everything, then tell
Varnish to forward everything to new remote backend, then we flip the
DNS switch.  In that scenario we are essentially using Varnish to
cover us while DNS converges.  We've never had to adjust any timeout
values, though we are on decent networks.

Nathan