Filling the varnish cache

[Sam Davey]

Hi,

I am running varnish-2.1.5 which is performing great.  However I want
to ensure all visitors experience the speed benefits of the cache.

Currently the first visitor to a particular URL will experience a full
page load with all the apache, php, database overheads associated with
a none cached request.  And with the version of varnish I am running
the cache is always purges if the service is restarted.

I am currently using the scrapy web crawling framework which works
quite well bit it isn't a good fit for my production environment
(CentOS5 and python2.6 don't go easily) and I would prefer to build a
solution into my application so that purging and crawling can be
triggered intelligently.  The web application is php which I realise
is not the most efficient language to spider with, however I'm sure I
could l knock something up using the CURL library.

So my question is:

What tried and tested methods do other people use to fill their varnish cache?

Kind Regards,

Sam
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