Survey; how do you use Varnish?

[Ross Brown]

1) How many servers do you have running Varnish?

8 servers (2 sites x 4 servers), load balanced behind F5 GTM. We aim to be able to lose a site AND suffer a hardware failure and keep on truckin'. We could probably run on one or two servers at a push, but our backend would most likely explode before Varnish broke a sweat.
Each server is a quad core Xeon w/ 16G RAM. We have a fairly large working set.

(+1 Varnish server for Dev / test, which is a VM)

2) What sort of total load are you having? Mbit/s or hits per second are preferred metrics.

~900 req/sec at peak per Prod server / 60Mbps

3) What sort of site is it?
  *) Retail <= online auctions

4) Do you use ESI?
No.

5) What features are you missing from Varnish. 
Varnishlog filtering language (or other enhancements in this area)
Dynamic stats counters
Large dataset performance improvements


-----Original Message-----
From: varnish-misc-bounces at projects.linpro.no [mailto:varnish-misc-bounces at projects.linpro.no] On Behalf Of Martin Boer
Sent: Tuesday, 2 February 2010 10:23 p.m.
To: Per Andreas Buer
Cc: varnish-misc at projects.linpro.no
Subject: Re: Survey; how do you use Varnish?

1) One active server. We have another one as hot standby.

2) 50Mbit, 200 requests/second max. Most of the time it's 10Mbit, 40 
requests/second which isn't much.

3) Internet touroperator.

4) Nope

5) Automatic refreshing of data without having the endusers have to wait 
for the response.

The reason we use varnish most is because our website has complex, 
timeconsuming queries to backend systems. The answers to these queries 
do vary several times per day but are still cachable. Of course varnish 
also helps te bring down the load on those backend systems but the main 
use is that varnish gives the endusers a lightning fast prerendered 
interactive experience which is a paradox. We like working paradoxes.

Something like 'refresh pages after object.prefetch seconds if at least 
someone requested that object the last object.ttl seconds' where 
object.ttl is larger then object.refresh. So an object might be 
prefetched even a couple of times without anyone being interested but 
will be removed from the cache eventually after object.ttl has expired.

Regards,
Martin Boer



Per Andreas Buer wrote:
> Hi list.
>
> I'm working for Redpill Linpro, you might have heard of us - we're the main sponsor of Varnish development. We're a bit curious about how Varnish is used, what features are used and what is missing. What does a typical installation look like? The information you would choose to reveal to me would be aggregated and deleted and I promise you I won't use it for any sales activities or harass you in any way. We will pubish the result on this list if the feedback is significant. If you have the time and would like to help us please take some time and answer the questions in a direct mail to me. Thanks.
>
> 1) How many servers do you have running Varnish?
>
> 2) What sort of total load are you having? Mbit/s or hits per second are preferred metrics.
>
> 3) What sort of site is it?
>  *) Online media
>  *) Cooperate website (ibm.com or similar)
>  *) Retail
>  *) Educational
>  *) Social website
>
> 4) Do you use ESI?
>
> 5) What features are you missing from Varnish. Max three features, prioritized. Please refer to http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/PostTwoShoppingList for features. 
>
>
>
>   

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