Varnish configuration / (s)maxage

[Alan Runyan]

Hi guys.

We are using varnish very successfully.  I would like to give you guys
whatever feedback that I can.
The Zope/Plone system has a fairly sophisticated control system for
interacting with cache servers like Squid or Varnish.  And I was under
the impression that one of the way people configure Zope/Plone is like
this:

maxage: 0
smaxage: 604800
expires: in the past
proxy-must-revalidate

This basically states we want to cache in varnish for a week but never
in the browser.  This is a control that we use with Squid very
successfully.  Unfortunately this configuration does not seem to work
with varnish well.

What I spoke with phk about on #varnish was some mechanism for us to
peer into the cache so I can:

  - Query to see what is cached
  - See what each entry looks like

Early on in one of our configurations incorrect vcl configuration was
crashing varnishd.  That was kinda ugly.  Once it was configured
correctly -- all is well.

varnish is amazing!  I have a lot of feature requests *grin*.  But
what is important that there is a large community, Zope/Plone that
could benefit from this technology.  The community is already familiar
with complex caching configurations and most large systems use Squid
in production.  Moving to varnish is a no-brainer.  Especially once
varnish reaches feature parity with squid.  Specifically vary support.

cheers
alan runyan
~runyaga