misc questions

[Chris Hecker]

1.  Is there a way to set the default ttl inside the vcl?

2.  What's the recommended way of "disabling" varnish quickly for 
testing?  Can I just return pass at the top of recv and not worry about 
other stuff, or do I need to change all the functions?  Or, should I 
make a separate vcl file that's just a passthrough and not muck with my 
real one?

3.  If I've got mediawiki and wordpress (my two backends) purging 
correctly on edit, what should the ttl be on the content pages?  It 
seems like I should set it to something high, right?  mediawiki sets it 
to 18000s, but wp doesn't set it as far as I can tell from the log.

4.  If I've got varnish working in front of wordpress, I assume I don't 
need any of the caching plugins or any other hacks like those, right?

Chris

PS.  I'm on 32 bit CentOS 5.5 and varnish 2.0.6, and varnish seems to be 
working fine so far.  In fact, it's blazing fast compared to httpd + 
APC, like hundreds of times faster in my tests so far.  It took forever 
for me to get my stuff set up the way I want, and I still think I have 
wordpress cookie issues, but in siege tests it's just incredibly fast 
and uses very little cpu/mem.  The true test will be when I get 
redditted again, I guess.