varnish as general purpose web cache

[Rainer Duffner]

> Am 03.11.2019 um 17:35 schrieb Sven Oehme <oehmes at gmail.com>:
> 
> you are saying you can't do this with varnish or you are just suggesting to see if I can make it work with squid ?
> 



Varnish is a cache for incoming request to a website (or a couple of websites)

It was never intended as a forward-cache, like Squid. And I doubt it can actually be made to work that way in any even remotely reasonable fashion.

That said, I would really like to know if Squid (which would be the primary tool to try this) does bring any kind of significant improvement these days - at all.

A lot of content is personalized (everything that carries a cookie) and Squid does (hopefully) not store and cache it.
On top of that, Squid, per definition, cannot store content delivered over HTTPS (which is at least 90 and probably closer to 97%) of content these days.
You’d need to setup SSL interception etc.pp.
 
Browsers are a lot better at caching locally, too, these days, as are websites at instructing browsers to do so.

So, in summary, it’s not the 90s anymore, better get a faster WiFi/internet connection or apply some traffic shaping to nobody can abuse all the bandwidth.