Varnish use for purely binary files

[Michael S. Fischer]

On Jan 18, 2010, at 3:37 PM, pub crawler wrote:

>> Differences in latency of serving static content can vary widely based on
>> the web server in use, easily tens of milliseconds or more.  There are
>> dozens of web servers out there, some written in interpreted languages, many
>> custom-written for a specific application, many with add-ons and modules and
> 
> Most webservers as shipped are simply not very speedy.   Nginx,
> Cherokee, Lighty are three exceptions :)
> Latency is all over the place in web server software.  Caching is a
> black art still no matter where you are talking about having one or
> lacking one :)  Ten milliseconds is easily wasted in a web server,
> connection pooling, negotiating the transfer, etc.  Most sites have so
> many latency issues and such a lack of performance.  

Let me clear, in case I have not been clear enough already:

I am not talking about the edge cases of those low-concurrency, high-latency, scripted-language webservers that are becoming tied to web application frameworks like Rails and Django and that are the best fit for front-end caching because they are slow at serving dynamic content.  

But we are not discussing serving dynamic content in this thread anyway.  We are talking about binary files, aren't we?  Yes?  Blobs on disk?  Unless everyone is living on a different plane then me, then I think that's what we're talking about.

For those you should be using a general purpose webserver.  There's no reason you can't run both side by side.  And I stand by my original statement about their performance relative to Varnish.

--Michael