Varnish Proxy

By | October 12, 2009

So one of the more interesting projects in my opinion is the Varnish Cache project (http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/).

Now I know I’m supposed to be this pro-Microsoft guy now what with all the certs and working with it day in and out, but the budget crunch has hit us pretty hard.

So, when the GIS guys needed to get their award-winning Flex mapping project online and put it behind a proxy I did my research. Basically you’ve got Microsoft’s offering of ISA (expensive), Squid (uses the filesystem to cache..not efficient),  and Apache (kinda bloated).

Then I stumbled on Varnish proxy and haven’t looked back.

We deployed a Fedora Core 10 server into the DMZ, installed and configured varnish pointing to the internal addresses we wanted.

I did some load testing afterwards and before when the webserver (IIS) could handle roughly 30 req/sec it now can handle over 100 req/sec.
Just today I noticed we are getting about 1 million requests a day.

Long story short, it’s been up for almost a year now and after the initial tweaking we haven’t really had to touch it since.

If you’re looking for a non-ssl reverse proxy it’s worth a look

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