Varnish use for purely binary files

[Michael S. Fischer]

On Jan 18, 2010, at 3:54 PM, Ken Brownfield wrote:

> Adding unnecessary software overhead will add latency to requests to the filesystem, and obviously should be avoided.  However, a cache in front of a general web server will 1) cause an object miss to have additional latency (though small) and 2) guarantee object hits will be as low as possible.  A cache in front of a dedicated static file server is unnecessary, but worst-case would introduce additional latency only for cache misses.

Agreed.  This is what I was trying to communicate all along.  It was my understanding that this was what the thread was about.

>  Does [Apache] perform "well" for static files in the absence of any other function?  Yes.  Would I choose it for anything other than an application server?  No.  There are much better solutions out there, and the proof is in the numbers.


Not sure what you mean here... at my company it's used for everything but proxying (because Apache's process model is contraindicated at high concurrencies if you want to support Keep-Alive connections).  And we serve a lot of traffic at very low latencies.   

--Michael