Table of Contents
Welcome to the Varnish project
Varnish is a state-of-the-art, high-performance HTTP accelerator. It uses the advanced features in Linux 2.6, FreeBSD 6/7 and Solaris 10 to achieve its high performance.
Some of the features include
- A modern design
- VCL - a very flexible configuration language
- Load balancing with health checking of backends
- Partial support for ESI
- URL rewriting
- Graceful handling of "dead" backends
- more features...
Varnish is free software and is licenced under a modified BSD licence. Please read the introduction to get started with Varnish.
See what people blog about Varnish on Planet Varnish.
Trouble, Errata and things you should know
Here is our running log of things you probably want to know
News
2010-07-28 Varnish 2.1.3 Released
We are pleased to announce Varnish 2.1.3, a bug fix and feature release in the Varnish 2.1 series. The most notable changes are:
- The scalability of critbit, the default hashing method, has been improved
- A bug in varnishd would in some cases confuse varnishncsa leading to lost or wrong log lines.
- Some bugs in the handling of Range requests has been fixed. This only matters if you enable Range support.
- Add «log» command to VCL which will log to the Varnish log.
Downloads at the usual spot.
New documentation
There is a brand new installation guide and a tutorial. Also, the man pages are now put online as part of a reference guide. Please see http://varnish-cache.org/docs/
2010-05-05 Varnish 2.1.2 Released
We have released Varnish 2.1.2 - a bug fix release. The only change is a one line change that fixes a bug introduced in 2.1.1 when adding Range support. This bug which would append garbage to objects larger than the chunk size, by default 128k. This only affects content transfered with chunked encoding. Browsers would do the right thing due to Content-Length, but some load balancers would get very confused.
2010-04-26 Varnish 2.1.1 Released
We have just released Varnish 2.1.1 - a bug fix and feature release of the Varnish 2.1 series. The most notable changes are:
- Experimental support for the Range header, must be enabled with the http_range_support parameter.
- A bug in workspace rollback prevented ESI from working correctly in all situations. This is now fixed.
- A race condition and a deadlock in the critbit hasher have been fixed.
- HEAD requests are no longer converted to GET requests for pass and pipe.
- Support for completely obliterating objects including all variants («nuke»). See http://varnish-cache.org/changeset/4668 for details
This is a summary of the changes, please see the changelog for a more full list.
2010-03-24 Varnish 2.1.0 released
Varnish 2.1.0 has just been released. It contains lots of changes relative to 2.0.6, the most important ones being:
- Experimental support for persistent cache
- The regular expression engine is now PCRE
- Saint mode, where we try to grace an object.
- A more scalable hashing method called critbit
- Increased scalability, removing a limitation of maximum 64k connections
- obj_workspace is removed, this is now scaled automatically
- Hashing and client IP based directors
Note: The release has some syntaxchanges in VCL, please read the full changelog
2010-02-05 Varnish User Group meeting 2 announced
On the 29th and 30th of March 2010 we will hold the next Varnish User Group meeting in Amsterdam.
For more information and how to sign up see the VUG2 page.
2009-12-16 Varnish 2.0.6 released
Varnish 2.0.6 has just been released. This release contains multiple changes, amongst them:
- Fix off-by-one error in ESI handling
- Bug fixes related to session lingering
- Backend probes should now work correctly with more servers
- Portability fixes
- Make it possible to specify the per-thread stack size, useful for 32 bit systems
There are some old news as well.
Source
- Download Varnish from SourceForge
- Pre 2.0 releases
- Repository
- Short term roadmap details changes in future releases
- PostTwoShoppingList is a more strategic overview of what could be done in the future
Documentation
- Main documentation site.
- an introduction to varnish. Read this first.
- Installation guide.
- Tutorial.
- The old Getting started, still relevant.
- The various features of varnish explained.
- Installing Varnish
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- VCL Syntax, formalized and detailed descriptions.
- VCL Examples, small snippets for doing common tasks.
- CLI, CLI documentation
- VTLA, VTLA documentation
Resources
- varnish-software.com is our commercial sister-site
- Commercial support can be bought
- Debugging Varnish
- Performance tuning of Varnish and the underlying OS
- Developer resources
- Accelerating Wordpress with Varnish
- Varnishing over Drupal
Community support
- IRC channel: #varnish on irc.linpro.no
- Mailing lists
- Varnish User Group meetings
About this Wiki
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