The document provides an overview of Varnish and its integration with Magento, explaining Varnish as a reverse proxy and web accelerator designed for handling content-heavy dynamic websites. It highlights various features of Varnish, such as load balancing, customization capabilities, and management interfaces. Additionally, the document discusses how Magento can leverage Varnish for caching, improving performance, and handling dynamic content efficiently.

1. Magento Varnish-Cache Integration

2. What is Varnish?

3. Varnish is a …
“…transparent, hard, protective finish or film
primarily used in wood finishing but also for other
materials…”
Wikipedia: Varnish

4. So…what is Varnish?

5. Varnish is…
=

6. Applause, please!

7. And Varnish-Cache?

8. Varnish-Cache is defined as…
 Reverse proxy
 Web Accelerator
 HTTP Accelerator

9. So…Varnish-Cache is not…

10. What is a proxy?
“In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a
computer system or an application) that acts as an
intermediary for requests from clients seeking
resources from other servers…”
Wikipedia: Proxy server

11. Proxy concept

12. Types of proxy: Forward

13. Forward Proxy: Examples

14. Types of proxy: Reverse

15. Reverse Proxy: Examples

16. Varnish-Cache Features: Part 1
• Designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites
• Heavily threaded, with each client connection being handled by a separate worker thread
• Varnish Configuration Language (VCL)
• Load balancing and backend health polling

17. Varnish-Cache Features: Part 2
• Support for Edge Side Includes
• Graceful handling of dead and slow backends
• The web management administration interface
• The management port
• Live statistics and logging

18. Example Infrastructure: Part 1

19. Example Infrastructure: Part 2

20. Example Infrastructure: Part 3

21. Does Magento support Varnish?
WHY ?
• Dynamic content/Personalization
• Painstaking customization of VCL
• No tagging/Partial flushing
• Session Cookie
NO

22. Diluting Varnish with Turpentine
• Full Page Caching, with hole-punching via Varnish ESI and/or AJAX
• Configurable via standard Magento methods
• Able to generate and apply new Varnish VCLs on the fly
• Blacklist requests from caching by URL or parameters (SID, store, etc)
• Configure cache TTL by URL and individual block's TTL
• Supports multiple Varnish instances for clustered usage
• Automatic cache clearing on Magento actions
• Supports non-root Magento installs and multi-store/multi-site setups
• Support for site-crawlers for cache warming

23. Request flow with Varnish

24. What can we do with it ?
• Cache static pages
• Homepage
• CMS
• Contacts
• Etc
• Cache catalog pages
• Category listings
• Product search results
• Product view pages

25. How fast is FAST ?

26. Lessons learned
Triple check
• Dynamic blocks in the project
MiniCart
Login
Anything customer related
• Currency & Store View switcher
• 3rd Party modules in Admin !
• Checkout
• Payment gateways redirects
• Customer groups
• Design Exceptions

27. Further optimizations
The fastest HTTP request is the one not made
– Use cookie or local storage (IE>7) when:
- Adds a product to a cart
- Logs in or logs out
- Adds a product to a compare list
- Recently viewed products, etc
Increase Hit Ratio
– Cache 404 pages
– Redirects
KEEP PUSHING

28. References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7t2Sp174eI
https://github.com/nexcess/magento-turpentine
https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VarnishFeatures#Livestatisticsandlogging

29. Thank You !
Gustavo G. Moyano
DevOps Engineer
Ezequiel A. Kupelian
Dev. Manager