Varnish is the fastest and most flexible web accelerator solution on the market. Based on open source, it is readily available for free. The only cost involved is for optionaler support and customization.

- Varnish drew a lot of attention internationally when it was first released, offering 10 to 20 times faster web pages as well as reducing the hardware needs by up to 90 percent, says Product Adoption manager Christopher Grenness of Redpill Linpro,.

Since the initial launch in September 2006, a monthly average of 2,000 copies of Varnish have been downloaded to at a number of countries around the world.

The web edition of leading Norwegian daily Verdens Gang ( vg.no) , was able to offer readers vastly improved response time on a single server, where they previously needed twelve. Incidentally, VG was the initiator of the Varnish development project.

US-based Observer Group is another enthusiastic user. Using Varnish, their popular political site politicker.com experienced a a 50-fold increase of traffic capacity. Response time was reduced by 80 percent and hardware costs by 50 per cent.

- But even though Varnish is the perfect solution for large media sites, smaller web sites also benefit from Varnish, for instance by optimizing response time at traffic peaks, says Grenness.

Functions in the new version

Varnish 2.0 offers improved compression and expanded support for filtering web content for caching.

A major new function is ESI include support – a language enabling dynamic partial updates of web pages based on predefined selections. For instance, specific elements on a web page may be updated more frequently from the server to the web accelerator. This increases speed and reduces storage requirements, but best of all: it enables Varnish to cache content from web pages where users are logged on.

Additional new features include:

• Tighter integration with CMS solutions
• Load balancing support
• Better scaling and improved accelerator tuning
• Improved stability

Varnish 2.0 has matured since version 1.0, based on customer and user feedback..

The software is based on open source, with a BSD license. Redpill Linpro offers installation, support, maintenance and training assistance.

Varnish has been developed for running on newer Unix-like operating systems, but primarily Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

Download

Download the application and source code from Sourceforge.net.

Contact

varnish@linpro.no

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Christopher Grenness
Product Adoption Manager
Cell: +47 905 68168