Instant Varnish Cache How-to

Starting

Roberto Moutinho
January 2013

Hands-on recipes to improve your website's load speed and overall user experience with Varnish

$14.99

RRP $14.99

eBook

Book Details

ISBN 139781782160403

Paperback56 pages

About This Book

Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
Connect and health-check application servers with Varnish Cache
Load balance requests across clustered servers
Define caching policies and request/response workflow

Who This Book Is For

This book is aimed at system administrators and web developers who need to scale websites without tossing money on a large and costly infrastructure. It’s assumed that you have some knowledge of the HTTP protocol, how browsers and server communicate with each other, and basic Linux systems.

Chapter 1: Instant Varnish Cache How-to

Installing Varnish Cache (Must know)

Varnish Cache server daemon options (Must know)

Connecting to backend servers (Should know)

Load balance requests (Should know)

The Varnish Configuration Language (Should know)

Handling HTTP request vcl_recv (Should know)

Handling HTTP request vcl_hash (Should know)

Handling HTTP request vcl_pipe and vcl_pass (Should know)

Handling HTTP response vcl_fetch (Should know)

Handling HTTP response vcl_deliver (Should know)

Handling HTTP response vcl_error (Should know)

Caching static content (Should know)

Cookies, sessions, and authorization (Become an expert)

HTTP cache headers (Should know)

Invalidating cached content (Should know)

Compressing the response (Become an expert)

Monitoring the hit ratio (Become an expert)

What You Will Learn

Install and configure Varnish Cache
Connect application servers to Varnish Cache
Load balance requests
Request and response workflow inside the Varnish
Caching and compressing static content
Session and cookie handling
Invalidating stale content

In Detail

When you're doing business on the Web, every second counts. 80 percent of the end user response time is spent on downloading content to the browser, and Varnish Cache is here to help you solve this problem in a simple and effective way.

"Varnish Cache How-to" is a practical, hands-on guide that will take you from beginner to advanced, improving your website speed and dropping the bounce and page abandonment rates of your website. With easy-to-follow recipes, this book will help you take advantage of caching your application server’s response to avoid a duplicated workload.

This book will take you from the installation of the Varnish Cache server to defining caching policies, the normalization of static content, and a final production-ready fast and scalable cache server.

You will learn to balance requests across servers based on input data or pre-defined settings, create persisted sessions (sticky sessions), compress static content, and modify requests. If you want to improve the speed and also provide a fail-over mechanism to achieve a fast and available website, then this book is for you.

By the end of this book, you’ll learn how to scale and improve the user‘s experience by providing a fast and available website.

Authors

Roberto Moutinho

Roberto Moutinho is a system analyst, DevOPs evangelist, Open Source and Open Standards advocate currently residing in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Passionate about the Web, he’s currently a web developer working in one of the largest classified platforms in Latin America optimizing the overall performance of in-house and third-party services. When off duty, you’ll often find him taking apart old electronics to salvage components for weird and often useless DIY projects.