Best approach for expiring objects

[George Georgovassilis]

Hello Tyler,

> So there you have it, removing objects from varnish is tedious, and full of
> pitfalls. I understand the architecture of varnish just well enough to know
> why it works this way, but I still wish it was better.
>
> If I am approaching this problem the wrong way, I am more than happy to hear
> some thoughts.
I had a similar issue a while back and solved it with the ETag header. I 
must admit though that in my case it was rather easy to compute, either 
based on the last modified timestamp of a static file that was changed 
or a timestamp in the database - you always can compute an ETag from a 
timestamp, you don't neccessarily need to md5 on the contents. If you 
can't intervene in the backend architecture or it turns out to be too 
slow, then this approach can't help you of course.

Regards,
G.