Varnish use for purely binary files

[Ken Brownfield]

> 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.

Definitely wasn't clear until now.

But now I'm not sure what we're discussing, since comparing the performance of a reverse-proxy cache to an origin server is rather pointless.

A cache hit under Varnish will be comparable in latency to a dedicated static server hit, regardless of the backend.  The rate of misses will determine whether a dedicated static server would be required, and this is a growth path that many companies follow.
-- 
Ken

> --Michael