Dealing with large unwanted objects

[Per Buer]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Mark Moseley <moseleymark at gmail.com> wrote:
> We've had varnish running in a web hosting environment for quite a
> while. As such, most of the things we ask it to cache are of a sane
> size, but being web hosting, customers come up with the most painful
> corner cases. I've been looking for the "right" way to do this for a
> few months now but I'm not even sure there is a way to do what I'm
> looking for. What I'm trying to do is *not* cache an object that's way
> too big (which will almost certainly knock other things out of the
> working set). I'm doing a half-way job of it by calling 'pass' in
> vcl_fetch, i.e.,

Just a comment to make everything crystal clear. I'm sorry if I'm
Captain Obvious here. When Varnish does a pass it will do so as a
store-and-forward kind of operation. So Varnish will turn to the
backend, fetch the object, free space in its store, fetch it deliver
it and then discard of it. The bad news is that it might knock out a
few object - the good news is that the space is quickly freed up
again.


-- 
Per Buer,  Varnish Software
Phone: +47 21 98 92 61 / Mobile: +47 958 39 117 / skype: per.buer