Does Varnish play nicely with Movable Type?
We have a 2 webserver setup that traffic is load balanced to and the app home is going to be on a NAS. Will it work to install Varnish on the webservers to cache static content from the NAS for the website? Have you ever heard of this being done before?
Thanks in advance,
Blake
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
No reason why it wouldn't, in any mode other than dynamic publishing. You'll just need to make sure that Varnish makes the content accessible at the same URL that you specified for the blog under publishing preferences and that MT is publishing the files to the NAS (these settings can be independent in MT).
I have MT running with Varnish (on a single machine, though, using nginx as web server), and it works incredibly well. That said, if you have a configuration that works without Varnish, it should work with Varnish - dynamic publishing, too.
If the web server and Varnish run on the same machine, just make sure your normal web server runs on a different port than 80. Besides that: All you have to do (not talking about some Varnish VCL tuning to e.g. strip cookies for non-admin access etc. so you have as much cached as possible etc.) is to point Varnish to this or these backends, and you should be set.
If you explicitly want to cache only static assets, you can configure it this way, and have everything else passed through. It still has reside on the defined backends, though, and can't be rerouted to another server. For this kind of setup, you may consider a Varnish -> nginx -> Apache setup, where nginx provides anything static, and fetches anything dynamic. That part probably is only necessary with high traffic / low caching dynamic pages, as nginx scales incredibly well.
If you happen to use Varnish, MT and static publishing, I just programmed a plugin that purges Varnish's cache of modified entries, so you can stretch out caching times even further without ever having outdated content. Let me know if you want to have it (no, it's free, it's GPL, I just haven't made it public (yet?)).
- Ben
Thanks for the info Ben! I actually did end up putting Varnish in front and got it working pretty well. We're in the middle of moving to WordPress so no need for the plugin. Thanks for the offer though and it sounds like a nice plugin to have if using MT. Also, I couldn't agree with you more about scaling nginx. nginx is such an awesome webserver with so much to give!
-Blake