apache+zope+varnish

[Ricardo Newbery]

On Sep 24, 2007, at 11:20 PM, jean-marc pouchoulon wrote:

>> Use-cases differ of course, but I'm partial to the other way  
>> around.  Put Apache in front of Varnish and Varnish in front of  
>> Zope.  And if you need load balancing, insert something like Pound  
>> between Varnish and the Zeo clients (although there is some work  
>> in Varnish trunk to add load balancing).  This configuration frees  
>> up Apache to serve other stuff besides the Varnish cached content.
>>
> IMHO apache perf cannot rivalize with varnish , that's why I put  
> them  behind varnish. We have differents applications (differents  
> apache) and varnish regex are sufficient to switch the traffic.
> Apache 2.2 (load balancing + mod_rewrite) is used to do load  
> balancing on ZEO .In our case there are also hardware compression  
> and load balancing in front of varnish.
>
> but "Use-cases differ of course" and there are many good solutions  
> and  I am not using plone


Note, this configuration has nothing to do with whether one is using  
Plone.  :-)

Varnish is good as a proxy in front of *slow* backends generating  
dynamic content, but I suspect it's probably of marginal benefit as a  
proxy to serve static content and possibly even when serving *fast*  
dynamic content.

I'm curious about the claim about Apache performance in comparison to  
Varnish.  Is Varnish serving from cache really that much faster than  
Apache serving static files?  I suppose an argument can be made that  
Apache-in-front-of-Varnish might add an extra delay compared to  
Varnish serving from cache directly.  I wonder if this delay is  
significant.  Anyone have any benchmarks?

Ric