Delivering expired documents when backend is down

[Anders Nordby]

Hi!

One of the design goals of Varnish was to be able to deliver content
when your backend is down, as far as I can remember. Now, I may be
stupid, but in mgt_vcc.c, there is this default VCL which is confusing:

sub vcl_timeout{
        discard;
}

Is the object really discarded? What sort of trouble would I be
getting into if I remove discard from vcl_timeout?

Basically, I want to know, how do I deliver expired content if backend
is down. There's no toggle to switch on and off such a behaviour?

Is the answer to use a sufficiently high ttl?

Bye,

-- 
Anders.