Varnish and Website Performance

This section focuses on how to tune the performance of your Varnish server, and how to tune the performance of your website using Varnish.

The section is split in three subsections. The first subsection deals with the various tools and functions of Varnish that you should be aware of. The next subsection focuses on the how to purge content out of your cache. Purging of content is essential in a performance context because it allows you to extend the time-to-live (TTL) of your cached objects. Having a long TTL allows Varnish to keep the content in cache longer, meaning Varnish will make fewer requests to your relatively slower backend.

The final subsection deals with compression of web content. Varnish can gzip content when fetching it from the backend and then deliver it compressed. This will reduce the time it takes to download the content thereby increasing the performance of your website.

• Achieving a high hitrate
  • Tool: varnishtop
  • Tool: varnishlog
  • Tool: lwp-request
  • Tool: Live HTTP Headers
• The role of HTTP Headers
  • Cookies
  • Cache-Control
  • Age
  • Pragma
  • Authorization
  • Overriding the time-to-live (TTL)
  • Forcing caching for certain requests and certain responses
  • Normalizing your namespace
• HTTP Vary
  • Vary parse errors
  • Pitfall - Vary: User-Agent
• Cache misses
• Uncacheable content
  • Passing client requests
  • hit-for-miss
  • hit-for-pass
• Purging and banning
  • HTTP Purging
  • Bans
  • Forcing a cache miss
• Compression
  • Default behaviour
  • Compressing content if backends don’t
  • Uncompressing content before entering the cache
  • GZIP and ESI
  • Turning off gzip support
  • A random outburst