1. Make your
website fly
using Varnish
Fabrizio Branca
T3DD12

2. Fabrizio Branca
System Developer
AOE media
Wiesbaden
TYPO3 & Magento
Twitter: @fbrnc
Blog: http://www.fabrizio-branca.de

3. You?!
• Who has any experience with Varnish?
• Who has a production site using Varnish?
• Who has played around with Varnish?
• Who has experience with any other
reverse proxy solution?

4. 1m visitors in 24h
5000 concurrent users

5. Secret ingredient:
Varnish
http://www.flickr.com/photos/judybaxter/8155091/

6. Reverse proxy caching
Request
Browser TYPO3
(Apache + PHP + Mysql)
Response

7. Reverse proxy caching
Browser Varnish TYPO3
(Apache + PHP + Mysql)

8. Reverse proxy caching
Browser Nginx Varnish TYPO3
(Apache + PHP + Mysql)
- SSL termination
- (Compression)

9. Reverse proxy caching
Browser Nginx Varnish TYPO3
(Apache + PHP + Mysql)

10. Varnish
HTTP Caching Load Failover
Accelerator Reverse Proxy Balancer system
„Varnish makes websites fly“

11. Varnish
• Created by Poul-Henning Kamp
• Varnish Configuration Language (VCL)
– DSL, will be translated into C code and compiled
• Varnish uses thread and memory
management of the operation system
• Additional tools: varnishtop, varnishlog,…
• Online-Documentation:
http://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/2.1/

12. Stability

13. Efficiency

14. CPU load

15. Speed

16. Installation
• In Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install varnish
sudo vi /etc/default/varnish
START=yes
sudo /etc/init.d varnish start
• Will be started automatically on boot
• Listens to port 6081 by default
• Uses 127.0.0.1:8080 as a backend by default
• /etc/varnish/default.vcl

17. Setup
Amazon ELB
Load F5
Balancer Varnish
Varnish Varnish
TYPO3 frontends TYPO3 backend

18. Nginx, Varnish, Apache setup

19. Request Lifecycle (simplified)
Complete workflow: http://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VCLExampleDefault

20. Pitfalls
• Vary: User-Agent
(also implicitly set e.g. SetEnvIf)

21. Tools: Varnishhist

22. Restart / Reload
• Restart: Flushes complete cache
• Reload: Reads VCL without flushing cache

23. 855,78
Pages/Second
Benchmarks
3,45 10,72
Pages/Second
Pages/Second
TYPO3 TYPO3 TYPO3
without cache with cache with Varnish

24. Sending correct headers
• config.sendCacheHeaders = 1
• The conditions for allowing client caching are:
– page was cached
– No *_INT or *_EXT objects were on the page (eg.
USER_INT)
– No frontend user is logged in
– No backend user is logged in
• If these conditions are met, the headers sent are:
– Last-Modified [SYS_LASTCHANGED of page id]
– Expires [expire time of page cache]
– Etag [md5 of content]
– Cache-Control: max-age: [seconds til expiretime]
– Pragma: public

25. EXT:cacheinfo
• http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/extens
ion-cacheinfo

26. Purging
• http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/extens
ion-purge
• Configuration in VCL
• Access protect
• Purge using Shift+Reload

27. Punching Holes…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/3053981107/lightbox/

28. Punching holes
Cookie /
ESI AJAX Client
storage

29. Tuning
• Different lifetimes for clients and Varnish
• Cache status codes > 400
• Redirects
• Protect the backend!

30. Further reading
• Varnish (inkl. Dokumentation)
http://www.varnish-cache.org
• Poul-Henning Kamp at T3CON10
http://vimeo.com/16676188
• http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/extension-
moc_varnish
• http://www.fabrizio-branca.de/varnish.html
• http://www.fabrizio-branca.de
• https://github.com/fbrnc

31. Questions?
Mail: fabrizio.branca@aoemedia.de
Twitter: @fbrnc
Blog: http://www.fabrizio-branca.de