varnish

I'm just experimenting with Varnish & Drupal 7 now and am getting stuck here:

http://groups.drupal.org/pantheon/mercurywiki#config-apache-varnish

I want to set this up in a environment on debian that uses both D6 & D7 sites. I'm not looking to use pressflow, but understand that this shouldn't be required with the changes in D7.

3a) The whole /etc/apache2/ports.conf

b) The top of /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

c) for D7:

Our use case for our Mercury install has suddenly changed in our architecture and it has been determined that we will use SSL only traffic.

I've been trying to read up on how to get Varnish to interact with HTTPS. It appears, to my dismay, that Varnish does not play well with SSL.

I've found this thread:
Enforcing SSL Behind AWS Load balancer
http://groups.drupal.org/node/115284

and this blog post
Setting up Pressflow and Varnish to work with HTTP and HTTPS
http://singlemindconsulting.com/blog/christoler/2010/8/setting-pressflow...

Hey Folks;

I've been doing a lot of performance tweaking with some of the sites I run (specifically http://latam.kaspersky.com). We have been running Varnish for some time and I recently managed to convince the powers-that-be that APC is perfectly safe and we're nuts for not running it.

We have a mercury server setup on VPS.net that is using multi-site to run multiple sites using the same Pressflow install. We recently ran into a problem with implementing our non-www to www canonical domain redirects. In the past we were able to uncomment the section of the .htaccess file included by Drupal to do these redirects because we were not using multi-site. Now that we are using multi-site we have tried to implement the redirects using apache vhosts but the redirect never seems to happen and it appears to be some kind of interference from Varnish that is keeping it from working.

pressflow and varnish work best together with external caching turned on, correct?

but External caching mode skips boot and exit hooks.

However, path_alias_cache uses hook_exit to set the paths into cache.

Are these two modes incompatible?

i.e. does varnish caching with external preclude path alias caching?

If not, any ideas what I'm missing? If so, anyone have a workaround?

I am seeing some odd cookies in a client's production environment that I cannot find anywhere in the Drupal code. Anyone seen this? What is the best approach to address this? I thought about configuring Varnish to only allow certain cookies to pass, and not pass any all other requests, but that does not seem like a good approach. Any ideas?

Hi everyone,

I had everything running nicely on AWS with 1.1 beta image but after upgrading all the modules (including varnish) and rebooting the instance all I get is a generic Varnish page with the above message.

Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

Many thanks,

Hi All,

I would appreciate some discussion/input regarding running with multiple varnish servers. We host a bunch of site on AWS, some of them are reasonably high traffic, and are integrating Varnish into our setup. We are currently considering 2 different configuration models: Option A: run with 2x Varnish frontend servers, passing off to the required backend servers; and: Option B: have each Drupal server with a dedicated Varnish machine (Mercury-type setup)...

Duration: 1 hour

Brief description: How do you create a site that can handle millions of page views per day without crumbling under the load? Caching won't solve all your site problems, but it has to be part of your strategy. In this session we'll cover Drupal's internal caching mechanisms, what Memcache can do for you, the types of scenarios that Varnish can cover, and the whys and wherefores of Edge Caching. We'll discuss the differences between building a static site that can handle thousands of page requests per second, and what it means to your performance when you start adding authenticated users and node edits.

Hi,

We begun our deployment of a large community website from a single machine that combined DB and web server two years ago. We experienced continuous growth and our system evolved significantly, different performance tunings led to the following setup (so far):