best way to not cache large files?

[Mark Moseley]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Chris Hecker <checker at d6.com> wrote:
>
> Anybody have any ideas?  They're not all the same mime type, so I think
> putting them in an uncached dir is better if there's no way to figure it out
> in vcl.
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> On 2011/03/13 07:26, AD wrote:
>>
>> i dont think you can check the body size (at least it seems that way
>> with the existing req.* objects ).  If you know the mime-type of the
>> file you might just be able to pipe the mime type if that works for all
>> file sizes ?
>>
>> I wonder if there is a way to pass the req object into some inline C
>> that can access the body somehow?
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 11:28 PM, Chris Hecker <checker at d6.com
>> <mailto:checker at d6.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>    I have a 400mb file that I just want apache to serve.  What's the
>>    best way to do this?  I can put it in a directory and tell varnish
>>    not to cache stuff that matches that dir, but I'd rather just make a
>>    general rule that varnish should ignore >=20mb files or whatever.
>>
>>    Thanks,
>>    Chris


I was asking about the same thing in this thread:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.varnish.misc/4741

Check out Tollef's suggestion towards the end. That's what I've been
using. The one drawback is that it's still fetched by varnish
*completely* in the first, not-yet-restarted request, which means that
a) you're fetching it twice; and b) it'll still stored albeit
momentarily, so it'll evict stuff if there's not enough room.

Before that, I wasn't sending any reqs for anything matching stuff
like .avi or .wmv to varnish (from an nginx frontend).

It'd be kind of neat if you could do a call-out and for anything
matching a likely large file (i.e. has extension matching .avi, .wmv,
etc), and do a HEAD request to determine the response size (or
whatever you wanted to look for) before doing the GET.