lurker?

[Kristian Lyngstol]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:36:44AM +0000, Lars Jørgensen wrote:
> > What was known as purges in Varnish 2.x is known as bans in 3.0, so a
> > bit of confusion...
> 
> Is that really the case? According to the documentation, both concepts
> still exists. As I understand them, a ban is a permanent filter, a
> purge is a deletion of cache object(s).

In Varnish 2:

- purge() from vcl AND cli took a regular expression that added a filter
  on a list. No objects in cache at the time of entry (that is: when
  purge() was run) that matches that regular expression would be served
  again - a new object would be fetched from the backend instead if
  requeted.
- No memory was freed using purge(), excet using the 'ban lurker' (which
  was, confusingly, never called the "purge lurker").
- "nuke" was an internal Varnish term that could free a single object in
  cache. It was never exposed in CLI or VCL.

In Varnish 3:

- ban() from vcl AND cli takes regular expressions and is the same as
  purge() from Varnish 2.0.
- No memory is freed using ban() in Varnish 3.0.
- purge; is exposed to VCL: This is a way to expose the previously
  internal 'nuke' mechanism, and allows you to remove a single object
  and all its variants. It only works on a single object+variants, and
  does not take a regular expression. It acts immediately and has no
  lingering effect save that some memory is freed and an object is
  removed from cache.

So yes, both ban() and purge; is available in Varnish 3. But what was
known as purge() in Varnish 2 has been re-named, and purge; in Varnish 3
is something entirely different, more similar to setting obj.ttl and
obj.grace to 0s for all variants of an object in vcl_hit.

This name-mixing is unfortunate, but believed to be less confusing in
the future when the ban()-vs-purge; terminology has had a chance to
settle itself in our documentation, wiki and daily talk.

The "PURGE" method (all caps) is usually used to reference a VCL
implementation of the fictional http PURGE method, which is intended to
do what purge; does in Varnish 3. In Varnish 2, it was usually
implemented by setting ttl and grace to 0s in vcl_hit, which would not
take care of all variants of an object.

I hope this clears things up a bit.

- Kristian