I wrote something similar for FB API access while I was at my last job, but with zero caching. This combined Varnish+Stunnel so that the varnish would redo kee

I wrote something similar for FB API access while I was at my last job, but with zero caching. This combined Varnish+Stunnel so that the varnish would redo keep-alives & stunnel could put it back over SSL. So there was a web-app (PHP) -> varnish:8081 (cheap-alive) -> stunnel:8080 (reverse ssl) -> api.fb:443. VCL makes Varnish much more of a programming language than a configuration system - but in total, skipping SSL negotiation in the PHP web-app and holding onto sessions via stunnel got APIs down from the 800ms -> 240ms range.