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Thursday, April 19, 2007

Varnish vs Squid - assembly still matters

Heart and M&Ms by Bob.Fornal from flickr (CC-NC-SA)Varnish is a server-side HTTP proxy, which is taking over the world as we speak. It does so by being 10x-20x faster than Squid on the same hardware. (at least that's the number they claim)

It does so not by using fancy algorithms by being aware of modern computer architectures.

Architecture Notes for Varnish are a great read. There's also a presentation about various other technical aspects of Varnish.

1 comment:

Bryan said...

I am looking at Squid and Varnish right now and Varnish really seems to be the answer to my problems.

Squid certainly has much more documentation and a larger following,but as my benchmarks have shown me, Varnish is just simply faster.

To give them each a fair shot, I ran the exact same tests on each.

My results show that Varnish serves up content several times faster than Squid does.

While the tests I ran really just test the throughput of the two applications it is still interesting to see.

Reverse Proxy Performance – Varnish vs. Squid (Part 1)