Varnish bypassing cache when if-modified-since header present?

Mike Hedlund mike at boom.net
Mon Jul 2 20:22:01 CEST 2007


Hey guys,

	I've been playing with varnish for the last few days, trying to eval it as a squid replacement my image serving farm. I enabled it on one of the squids friday (replacing 2 seperate squid processes on a single server), and seen pretty awesome results:

http://boom.net/~mike/squid_vs_varnish.GIF

However, the load on my backend NFS server went up by a substantial amount. I let it run over the weekend thinking it would smooth out once the caches were primed, but to my dismay, this morning nfs load was still the same. After doing some basic debugging, it appears as if the (default) varnish config is always re-validating if-modified-since headers (when supplied by the client), thus bypassing the local cache and hitting the origin server again. My cache objects *never* change, so if a client supplies an if-modified-since header, I'd like the cache to always respond '304 not modified' immediately. I've configured squid to do this, but my vcl-fu is very weak. Before I spent more time investigating the VCL config options, I just wanted a sanity check to make sure it was possible to do this in varnish.  At the bottom of this message i've included a small sample of a log file i generated this morning, I could be misreading it completely. Thanks!


ps: the above load graph is from an image server in my production pool, that was spitting out around 150Mb/s of images at the time.

-mike




   11 SessionOpen  c 10.1.1.9 33194
   11 ReqStart     c 10.1.1.9 33194 249494004
   11 RxRequest    c GET
   11 RxURL        c /85/40/458/tn_4096253716.jpg
   11 RxProtocol   c HTTP/1.1
   11 RxHeader     c Accept: */*
   11 RxHeader     c Accept-Language: en-us
   11 RxHeader     c Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
   11 RxHeader     c If-Modified-Since: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:02:51 GMT
   11 RxHeader     c If-None-Match: "13c02df-b23-40d6af72600c0"
   11 RxHeader     c User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
   11 RxHeader     c Host: a.pc.xyz.com:87
   11 RxHeader     c Connection: Keep-Alive
   11 VCL_call     c recv
   11 VCL_return   c pass
   11 VCL_call     c pass
   11 VCL_return   c pass
   14 BackendClose   default
   14 BackendOpen  b default 127.0.0.1 33977 127.0.0.1 81
   14 BackendXID   b 249494004
   11 Backend      c 14 default
   14 TxRequest    b GET
   14 TxURL        b /85/40/458/tn_4096253716.jpg
   14 TxProtocol   b HTTP/1.1
   14 TxHeader     b Accept: */*
   14 TxHeader     b Accept-Language: en-us
   14 TxHeader     b Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
   14 TxHeader     b User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
   14 TxHeader     b Host: a.pc.xyz.com:87
   14 TxHeader     b X-Varnish: 249494004
   14 TxHeader     b X-Forwarded-for: 10.1.1.9
   14 RxProtocol   b HTTP/1.1
   14 RxStatus     b 200
   14 RxResponse   b OK
   14 RxHeader     b Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:59:03 GMT
   14 RxHeader     b Server: Apache
   14 RxHeader     b Last-Modified: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:02:51 GMT
   14 RxHeader     b ETag: "13c02df-b23-40d6af72600c0"
   14 RxHeader     b Accept-Ranges: bytes
   14 RxHeader     b Content-Length: 2851
   14 RxHeader     b Content-Type: image/jpeg
   11 ObjProtocol  c HTTP/1.1
   11 ObjStatus    c 200
   11 ObjResponse  c OK
   11 ObjHeader    c Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:59:03 GMT
   11 ObjHeader    c Server: Apache
   11 ObjHeader    c Last-Modified: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:02:51 GMT
   11 ObjHeader    c ETag: "13c02df-b23-40d6af72600c0"
   11 ObjHeader    c Content-Type: image/jpeg
   11 ObjHeader    c Content-Length: 2851
   14 BackendReuse b default
   11 TTL          c 249494004 RFC 3600 1183399143 1183399143 0 0 0
   11 VCL_call     c fetch
   11 VCL_return   c insert
   11 Length       c 0
   11 TxProtocol   c HTTP/1.1
   11 TxStatus     c 304
   11 TxResponse   c Not Modified
   11 TxHeader     c Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:59:03 GMT
   11 TxHeader     c Via: 1.1 varnish
   11 TxHeader     c X-Varnish: 249494004
   11 TxHeader     c Last-Modified: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:02:51 GMT
   11 ReqEnd       c 249494004 1183399143.654401000 1183399143.656763000 0.000043000 0.002308000 0.000054000
    0 StatAddr       10.1.1.9 0 579 116 68 0 0 13 18505 6270
   11 SessionOpen  c 10.1.1.9 61746
   11 ReqStart     c 10.1.1.9 61746 249494005
   11 RxRequest    c GET
   11 RxURL        c /85/40/458/tn_4096253716.jpg
   11 RxProtocol   c HTTP/1.1
   11 RxHeader     c Accept: */*
   11 RxHeader     c Accept-Language: en-us
   11 RxHeader     c Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
   11 RxHeader     c If-Modified-Since: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:02:51 GMT
   11 RxHeader     c If-None-Match: "13c02df-b23-40d6af72600c0"
   11 RxHeader     c User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
   11 RxHeader     c Host: a.pc.xyz.com:87
   11 RxHeader     c Connection: Keep-Alive
   11 VCL_call     c recv
   11 VCL_return   c pass
   11 VCL_call     c pass
   11 VCL_return   c pass
   14 BackendClose b default
   14 BackendOpen  b default 127.0.0.1 33978 127.0.0.1 81
   14 BackendXID   b 249494005
   11 Backend      c 14 default
   14 TxRequest    b GET
   14 TxURL        b /85/40/458/tn_4096253716.jpg
   14 TxProtocol   b HTTP/1.1
   14 TxHeader     b Accept: */*
   14 TxHeader     b Accept-Language: en-us
   14 TxHeader     b Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
   14 TxHeader     b User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
   14 TxHeader     b Host: a.pc.xyz.com:87
   14 TxHeader     b X-Varnish: 249494005
   14 TxHeader     b X-Forwarded-for: 10.1.1.9
   14 RxProtocol   b HTTP/1.1
   14 RxStatus     b 200
   14 RxResponse   b OK
   14 RxHeader     b Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:59:21 GMT
   14 RxHeader     b Server: Apache
   14 RxHeader     b Last-Modified: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:02:51 GMT
   14 RxHeader     b ETag: "13c02df-b23-40d6af72600c0"
   14 RxHeader     b Accept-Ranges: bytes
   14 RxHeader     b Content-Length: 2851
   14 RxHeader     b Content-Type: image/jpeg
   11 ObjProtocol  c HTTP/1.1
   11 ObjStatus    c 200
   11 ObjResponse  c OK
   11 ObjHeader    c Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:59:21 GMT
   11 ObjHeader    c Server: Apache
   11 ObjHeader    c Last-Modified: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:02:51 GMT
   11 ObjHeader    c ETag: "13c02df-b23-40d6af72600c0"
   11 ObjHeader    c Content-Type: image/jpeg
   11 ObjHeader    c Content-Length: 2851
   14 BackendReuse b default
   11 TTL          c 249494005 RFC 3600 1183399161 1183399161 0 0 0
   11 VCL_call     c fetch
   11 VCL_return   c insert
   11 Length       c 0
   11 TxProtocol   c HTTP/1.1
   11 TxStatus     c 304
   11 TxResponse   c Not Modified
   11 TxHeader     c Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:59:21 GMT
   11 TxHeader     c Via: 1.1 varnish
   11 TxHeader     c X-Varnish: 249494005
   11 TxHeader     c Last-Modified: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:02:51 GMT
   11 ReqEnd       c 249494005 1183399161.148634000 1183399161.149295000 0.000041000 0.000607000 0.000054000
    0 StatAddr       10.1.1.9 0 597 117 69 0 0 14 18657 6270







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