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.

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Trouble, Errata and things you should know

Here is our running log of things you probably want to know

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News

2009-04-01 Varnish 2.0.4 released

Varnish 2.0.4 has just been released. This release contains multiple changes, amongst them:

• Serve graced objects if the backend is unhealthy.
• Portability fixes for Solaris, MacOS X/Darwin and NetBSD
• Documentation updates
• Added server.hostname and server.identity to VCL.
• Fixed a problem where we would sleep for far too long when we would run out of file descriptors.
• Add support for processing binary objects with ESI.

2009-02-12 Varnish 2.0.3 released

Varnish 2.0.3 has just been released. This release contains multiple changes, amongst them:

• Support for backend timeouts
• Multiple fixes in how we process ESI
• restart in vcl_hit is now supported
• Documentation has been updated
• Expiry processing is now more scalable
• The default session workspace is now 16k instead of 8k
• More graceful handling of too many headers from the client or the server.
• More expressive purges

2008-11-14 Varnish 2.0.2 released

Varnish 2.0.2 has now been released and contains the following changes:

• Fix possible ESI crash
• Increase stack size for varnishreplay, makes it work on Linux
• Fix random director to actually work properly
• Make it possible to remove duplicate purges.
• Add man page for varnishtest
• Make resp.status work correctly in VCL

2008-10-17 Varnish 2.0.1 released

This release contains a fix for a denial of service vulnerability in which Varnish could crash when receiving a malformed HTTP request.

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There are some old news as well.

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Source

• Download Varnish from SourceForge
• Current and past 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

• an introduction to varnish. Read this first.
• Getting started, read this also.
• 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

Resources

• varnish-cache.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

Community support

• IRC channel: #varnish on irc.linpro.no
• Mailing lists

About this Wiki

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