The sys admin's daily grind: Varnish
Slow and Steady
Columnist Charly gives Apache a slick coat of Varnish for better performance.
One still hears the saying, "Salad tastes much better if you replace it with a juicy steak shortly before you dine," although the humor is debatable. Admins are given tips in the same vein: "Apache delivers static content much faster if you replace it with Nginx shortly before the launch." The saying may not faze vegetarians, but it can cause a stir among server admins, including me.
I've just been assigned the task of tweaking Apache 2.2, which outputs almost only static content, for maximum performance. For several reasons, I can't just send the old guy into the desert. Apache is undisputed in terms of flexibility; however, when it comes to performance, it doesn't even bother to take off in pursuit of its rivals.
If I'm not allowed to ditch Apache, I would at least like to put it on a faster steed, such as a fast cache like Varnish [1]. The makers of Varnish designed it from scratch as a caching instance, and its capabilities are accordingly powerful. I could create complex rules in the specially provided Varnish Cache Language (VCL), but for buffering a static website, all I really need is a lean configuration. To begin, I reroute Apache using NameVirtualHost and Lists so that it listens on port 8080 instead of port 80 in future; Varnish can then take over on port 80, and its cache can pass on rich content directly to the client.
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