7 ms·

Varnish Cache 5.0

163 points by ruben_varnish 10y ago

boyter 10y ago
From the release notes http://varnish.org/docs/5.0/whats-new/relnote-5.0.html http://varnish.org/docs/5.0/whats-new/relnote-5.0.html "It is important that people understand that Free and Open Source Software isn't the same as gratis software: Somebody has to pay the developers mortgages and student loans." Varnish is an excellent piece of software, but I thought it was totally funded by the commercial side varnish software. How does this model work? It seems odd to ask for donations while also selling an expensive supported version?
- qeternity 10y ago
  "Until now Varnish Software has done a lot of work for the Varnish Cache project, but for totally valid reasons, they are scaling that back and the project either needs to pick up the slack or drop some of those activities." Why they are pulling back is anybody's guess. But it sounds like they are focusing on monetizing the existing codebase instead of further developing it.
- phkamp 10y ago
  Varnish Cache Author here. The Varnish Cache FOSS project and Varnish Software the company are two entirely different things. By and large, the Varnish Cache FOSS project is me, and I am not employed by Varnish Software: I have my own one-man company where I "make computers to do weird things". The time I spend on Varnish Cache is funded by "The Varnish Moral License": http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/index.html http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/index.html (See also: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2636165 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2636165) Varnish Software is one of the handful of companies who pay via the VML to keep me working on Varnish. Varnish Software has also supported the project in many other ways as well, from running the project server to donating manpower and source code. Some of these things are being scaled down, for instance the project server had become the square peg in their round internal IT systems, so I have been migrating that off to a server kindly sponsored by RootBSD.
  - boyter 10y ago
    Thanks so much for replying. I did notice the Moral License and was confused as to how it works. I will attempt to get some high profile users I know to help pay for some continued development.
tomschlick 10y ago
As someone who has never used Varnish but has used Nginx's cache to some degree... whats the benefit of placing varnish in the middle vs going with Nginx?
- corecoder 10y ago
  A one or two orders of magnitude greater speed, lots of configurations for caching policies, the ability to split a request in several subrequests (ESI) and some other nice things.
  - omn1 10y ago
    Not sure if the performance gains are still valid. There's reports that state the contrary: https://deliciousbrains.com/page-caching-varnish-vs-nginx-fastcgi-cache/ https://deliciousbrains.com/page-caching-varnish-vs-nginx-fa... Nginx has something similar to ESI called SSI (http://serverfault.com/questions/406103/main-differences-between-ssi-server-side-include-and-esi-edge-side-include http://serverfault.com/questions/406103/main-differences-bet...)
    - fgsch 10y ago
      There is quite a few places for improvement in that test (e.g. tweaking number of threads in Varnish) and by no means the tests are like for like. I will take it with a grain of salt or do your own tests, if you really care.
      - omn1 10y ago
        Yes, important point: Always test with your own infrastructure and run your own benchmark. There's nothing replacing own experimentation and experience. What works for one company does not necessarily work for others as well.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Faster and far more configurable, the configuration language (VCL) compiles to 'C' and you can inline bits of C if you want. https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectureInlineC https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectureInlineC
willvarfar 10y ago
Historically, PHK was a very vocal criticizer of SPDY and HTTP/2: http://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/http20.html http://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/http20.html Of course he relented and implemented SPDY and HTTP/2 anyway. But all the same I can't help but feel that his original criticsm still stands, and what we need is a rethink of e.g. cookies.
- youngtaff 10y ago
  The original brief for H2 was to have the same semantics etc, as HTTP/1.x From my reading PHK didn't think it went far enough, and wanted to change more. I think he's got good points to make on session ids, cookies etc. and I suspect we'll se some of the ideas feed into future versions too.
  - willvarfar 10y ago
    I don't think we will, because most in the driving seat make their money identifying visitors. Cynical but true.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jjoe 10y ago
It's always good to see new stuff coming out for Varnish. Do these changes warrant a major jump in release numbers especially when HTTP/2 support (biggest feature) is experimental? Anyway, I'm looking forward to testing it out and integrating v5 with Cachoid ( shameful plug: https://www.cachoid.com/ https://www.cachoid.com/ ).
- ksherlock 10y ago
  From the horse's mouth: > Varnish 5.0 changes some (mostly) internal APIs and adds some major new features over Varnish 4.1. > We are in the process of adding HTTP/2 support to Varnish ... we hope to have it production ready for the next major release (2017-03-15).
hannob 10y ago
Do I understand this right? It supports HTTP/2, but doesn't support HTTPS. Therefore it supports HTTP/2 in a mostly unusable form, because browser vendors (for good reasons) decided to support HTTP/2 only over HTTPS.
- ruben_varnish 10y ago
  Yes, Varnish does h2c so for HTTPS you will need something like 1.4 or later: https://hitch-tls.org/ https://hitch-tls.org/ Made by Varnish Software to provide a "browser-vendor-compliant" HTTP/2 stack.
  - jamwt 10y ago
    Hmm... you guys sure have pretty thoroughly sanitized all references to Stud at this point in code, documentation, READMEs, etc. :-(
    - lkarsten 10y ago
      Hi jamwt. We haven't forgotten your(?) excellent work on stud! Both changes.rst and the man page explain where Hitch came from. Hitch has seen significant changes since we forked stud 0.3.2, for example proper reload/sighup support, an improved configuration format, and OCSP stapling. Running it on a large scale (cert/ip -wise) also works better now. If you're ever in our parts of the world, let us know and we'll buy you some beers/coffee/$beverage and tell you all about how your old project is doing.
      - phkamp 10y ago
        Pssst, jamwt! Don't let them buy you beer. Insist on tasting their homebrew instead.
    - ruben_varnish 10y ago
      The reference to Bump is also on the copyright notice on the license file. As Lasse pointed out, we never meant to take away any merit from your work. If you feel we could highlight the Hitch's origin from Stud better, let us know how. We are open to suggestions. And yes, if you ever come to Oslo, you have an open invitation to come by an test our homebrew :)
flojo 10y ago
https://www.nginx.com/blog/maximizing-drupal-8-performance-nginx-part-ii-caching-load-balancing/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/maximizing-drupal-8-performance-n... In the BBC’s testing, they found that with NGINX as a drop-in replacement for Varnish, they saw five times more throughput.
- phkamp 10y ago
  I don't suppose that particular workload was very suited for Varnish in the first place, if you read carefully, you'll soon realize that most people don't have that kind of content. I have heard from (other parts of) BBC that Varnish saved a fair amount of bacon for them during the London Olympics, obviously in different workloads. And nobody would be more surprised than me, if Varnish was a micacle-cure for every single website in the world...
- cheald 10y ago
  nginx as a cache is very minimal-featured compared to Varnish. If it fits your workload, great. If not, Varnish is an exceptional tool.
- olavgg 10y ago
  PHK explained the cause of this is that the Linux kernel VM system performs poorly when overcomitted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752209 So the conclusion is, as long your malloc fits in your system memory, Varnish should be blazing fast on Linux. If you need a gigantic cache, please try FreeBSD.

163 points by ruben_varnish 10y ago

From the release notes http://varnish.org/docs/5.0/whats-new/relnote-5.0.html http://varnish.org/docs/5.0/whats-new/relnote-5.0.html "It is important that people understand that Free and Open Source Software isn't the same as gratis software: Somebody has to pay the developers mortgages and student loans." Varnish is an excellent piece of software, but I thought it was totally funded by the commercial side varnish software. How does this model work? It seems odd to ask for donations while also selling an expensive supported version?

qeternity 10y ago
"Until now Varnish Software has done a lot of work for the Varnish Cache project, but for totally valid reasons, they are scaling that back and the project either needs to pick up the slack or drop some of those activities." Why they are pulling back is anybody's guess. But it sounds like they are focusing on monetizing the existing codebase instead of further developing it.
phkamp 10y ago
Varnish Cache Author here. The Varnish Cache FOSS project and Varnish Software the company are two entirely different things. By and large, the Varnish Cache FOSS project is me, and I am not employed by Varnish Software: I have my own one-man company where I "make computers to do weird things". The time I spend on Varnish Cache is funded by "The Varnish Moral License": http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/index.html http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/index.html (See also: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2636165 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2636165) Varnish Software is one of the handful of companies who pay via the VML to keep me working on Varnish. Varnish Software has also supported the project in many other ways as well, from running the project server to donating manpower and source code. Some of these things are being scaled down, for instance the project server had become the square peg in their round internal IT systems, so I have been migrating that off to a server kindly sponsored by RootBSD.
- boyter 10y ago
  Thanks so much for replying. I did notice the Moral License and was confused as to how it works. I will attempt to get some high profile users I know to help pay for some continued development.

tomschlick 10y ago

As someone who has never used Varnish but has used Nginx's cache to some degree... whats the benefit of placing varnish in the middle vs going with Nginx?

corecoder 10y ago
A one or two orders of magnitude greater speed, lots of configurations for caching policies, the ability to split a request in several subrequests (ESI) and some other nice things.
- omn1 10y ago
  Not sure if the performance gains are still valid. There's reports that state the contrary: https://deliciousbrains.com/page-caching-varnish-vs-nginx-fastcgi-cache/ https://deliciousbrains.com/page-caching-varnish-vs-nginx-fa... Nginx has something similar to ESI called SSI (http://serverfault.com/questions/406103/main-differences-between-ssi-server-side-include-and-esi-edge-side-include http://serverfault.com/questions/406103/main-differences-bet...)
  - fgsch 10y ago
    There is quite a few places for improvement in that test (e.g. tweaking number of threads in Varnish) and by no means the tests are like for like. I will take it with a grain of salt or do your own tests, if you really care.
    - omn1 10y ago
      Yes, important point: Always test with your own infrastructure and run your own benchmark. There's nothing replacing own experimentation and experience. What works for one company does not necessarily work for others as well.
jacquesm 10y ago
Faster and far more configurable, the configuration language (VCL) compiles to 'C' and you can inline bits of C if you want. https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectureInlineC https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectureInlineC

willvarfar 10y ago

Historically, PHK was a very vocal criticizer of SPDY and HTTP/2: http://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/http20.html http://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/http20.html Of course he relented and implemented SPDY and HTTP/2 anyway. But all the same I can't help but feel that his original criticsm still stands, and what we need is a rethink of e.g. cookies.

youngtaff 10y ago
The original brief for H2 was to have the same semantics etc, as HTTP/1.x From my reading PHK didn't think it went far enough, and wanted to change more. I think he's got good points to make on session ids, cookies etc. and I suspect we'll se some of the ideas feed into future versions too.
- willvarfar 10y ago
  I don't think we will, because most in the driving seat make their money identifying visitors. Cynical but true.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jjoe 10y ago

It's always good to see new stuff coming out for Varnish. Do these changes warrant a major jump in release numbers especially when HTTP/2 support (biggest feature) is experimental? Anyway, I'm looking forward to testing it out and integrating v5 with Cachoid ( shameful plug: https://www.cachoid.com/ https://www.cachoid.com/ ).

ksherlock 10y ago
From the horse's mouth: > Varnish 5.0 changes some (mostly) internal APIs and adds some major new features over Varnish 4.1. > We are in the process of adding HTTP/2 support to Varnish ... we hope to have it production ready for the next major release (2017-03-15).

hannob 10y ago

Do I understand this right? It supports HTTP/2, but doesn't support HTTPS. Therefore it supports HTTP/2 in a mostly unusable form, because browser vendors (for good reasons) decided to support HTTP/2 only over HTTPS.

ruben_varnish 10y ago
Yes, Varnish does h2c so for HTTPS you will need something like 1.4 or later: https://hitch-tls.org/ https://hitch-tls.org/ Made by Varnish Software to provide a "browser-vendor-compliant" HTTP/2 stack.
- jamwt 10y ago
  Hmm... you guys sure have pretty thoroughly sanitized all references to Stud at this point in code, documentation, READMEs, etc. :-(
  - lkarsten 10y ago
    Hi jamwt. We haven't forgotten your(?) excellent work on stud! Both changes.rst and the man page explain where Hitch came from. Hitch has seen significant changes since we forked stud 0.3.2, for example proper reload/sighup support, an improved configuration format, and OCSP stapling. Running it on a large scale (cert/ip -wise) also works better now. If you're ever in our parts of the world, let us know and we'll buy you some beers/coffee/$beverage and tell you all about how your old project is doing.
    - phkamp 10y ago
      Pssst, jamwt! Don't let them buy you beer. Insist on tasting their homebrew instead.
  - ruben_varnish 10y ago
    The reference to Bump is also on the copyright notice on the license file. As Lasse pointed out, we never meant to take away any merit from your work. If you feel we could highlight the Hitch's origin from Stud better, let us know how. We are open to suggestions. And yes, if you ever come to Oslo, you have an open invitation to come by an test our homebrew :)

flojo 10y ago

https://www.nginx.com/blog/maximizing-drupal-8-performance-nginx-part-ii-caching-load-balancing/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/maximizing-drupal-8-performance-n... In the BBC’s testing, they found that with NGINX as a drop-in replacement for Varnish, they saw five times more throughput.

phkamp 10y ago
I don't suppose that particular workload was very suited for Varnish in the first place, if you read carefully, you'll soon realize that most people don't have that kind of content. I have heard from (other parts of) BBC that Varnish saved a fair amount of bacon for them during the London Olympics, obviously in different workloads. And nobody would be more surprised than me, if Varnish was a micacle-cure for every single website in the world...
cheald 10y ago
nginx as a cache is very minimal-featured compared to Varnish. If it fits your workload, great. If not, Varnish is an exceptional tool.
olavgg 10y ago
PHK explained the cause of this is that the Linux kernel VM system performs poorly when overcomitted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752209 So the conclusion is, as long your malloc fits in your system memory, Varnish should be blazing fast on Linux. If you need a gigantic cache, please try FreeBSD.