18 ms·

I'm not going to reply to this, because you clearly have no first hand experience with Varnish and merely parrot what negative opinions you have been able to se

• kev009 9y ago
  It's not about you in reality, just trying to save users some headaches. On the contrary you have no idea what I have tried and more importantly what rigorous comparisons my company has done to select the basis for our products. There are lots of choices, most of them have better trade offs. The ones I listed are also free software. It's no different than comparing/contrasting RDBMS.
  • phkamp 9y ago
    Yeah, right. Not at all a troll.
    • abritinthebay 9y ago
      You’re not helping. He brought up reasonable sounding criticisms and you responded with nothing but derisive insults. I respect your work but you’re making yourself look bad here. You appear to think he’s way off the mark technically so it should be easy to address his points, no?
      • jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago
        Don't expect much. I've been on email lists with PHK since the 90's. He's never shown any sign of interest in behavior other than what you see above.
        • jeremiep 9y ago
          Reading this thread reminds me of what Alan Kay said a few years ago: - The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. I've been doing web dev for over 15 years and this quote is pretty much how I would describe the web development scene.
        • abritinthebay 9y ago
          He doesn’t owe me anything: I use his work for free after all. I can merely try to open a dialogue about it. I can totally understand him being tired and irritated about criticism like this - running large, popular, OSS project sucks from that perspective
      • phkamp 9y ago
        No, they're not "reasonably sounding". Take for instance "but you're still going to be dropping performance on the floor vs other I/O models as you get into the 1000s of connections" Notice how it was written in passive voice, without any references to personal or 3rd party experience, and with nebulous hand-wavy numbers which can literally mean anything ? Well, he had to write it that way because he could not find any hard evidence to back it up anywhere, could he ? Here's some "reasonably sounding" information for you: builtwith.com reports that one eighth of the 10k largest web properties run Varnish. They would hardly do that, if performance "dropped on the floor" with "1000s of connections", would they ? You know what an actual Varnish users commented about performance after deploying Varnish on one of the worlds largest news sites? He made jokes about the servers being so bored that they were making grilled cheese sandwiches. No that comment is classical trolling: Technically sounding bla-bla, based on random google results, but totally removed from the legitimate and relevant critiques actual Varnish users bring.
        • the_duke 9y ago
          You still have not addressed any of the technical concerns raised by OP, but rather brought up some meaningless anecdotes. Why don't you refute the claims regarding IO models (event based vs threading) instead, engaging in a proper discussion? That would also prevent the downvotes you are receiving.
          • phkamp 9y ago
            Moving a fifth of all HTTP traffic is not a meaningless anecdote in my vocabulary. And engaging in a debate about irelevant technical details applicability in Varnish, with a person who clearly has never actually run Varnish ? I have better things to do on a saturday.
          • CJefferson 9y ago
            I'm not sure what you would want to see. The original post said, without evidence "vanish is unusably slow". Plainly, many large websites are using it successfully. How would one disprove accusations of slowness, without evidence, citations or benchmarks?
  • olavgg 9y ago
    I'm a varnish user and I have no complaints. It is well documented, easy to use and solves complex problems with VLC/VMODs. I'm not pushing nowhere near 100GB/s, but I have benchmarked up to 10GB/s which isn't a problem with default settings and just 1-2 CPU cores, this was with 8kb payloads. I'm sure you have some edge cases which requires heavy OS tuning, but I would not say it is fair to warn users against Varnish. With 100GB/s and very small HTTP requests you are clearly in a different group than 99.9999% of the rest and most likely also have the resources to write your own special case http cache or you could hire phk@ as a consultant.
    • kev009 9y ago
      These are both fair points, my perspective is from high scalability and some of the public technical marketing about its scalability wound me up.