Simon Willison’s Weblog

nginx proxy-cache-lock (via) Crucially important feature hidden away in the nginx documentation: proxy_cache_lock enables request coalescing, or dog-pile protection: it means that if a hundred simultaneous requests all suffer the same cache miss, only one request is made to the backend and the answer is then sent back to all hundred requests at once. I’ve leaned heavily on this feature in Varnish for years—useful to know that nginx has the same capability. # 14th November 2017, 9:53 pm

Display your events on your own website with Lanyrd Badges. We’ve launched badges for Lanyrd—JavaScript that lets you embed a top bar or a content “splat” showing events you plan to attend, talks you’ve given in the past and other various combinations. I’m quite pleased with the implementation—the badges are configured using classes on a link to your Lanyrd profile, and the badges themselves are served through a combination of Amazon CloudFront for the initial script and a Varnish cache for the badge data itself to keep things nice and snappy. # 13th January 2011, 8:38 pm

High-end Varnish-tuning. Tuning the Varnish HTTP cache to serve 27K requests/second on a single core 2.2GHz Opteron. # 20th October 2009, 9:25 am

Yahoo! proposal to open source “Traffic Server” via the ASF. Traffic Server is a “fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server” (presumably equivalent to things like Squid and Varnish) originally acquired from Inktomi and developed internally at Yahoo! for the past three years, which has been benchmarked handling 35,000 req/s on a single box. No source code yet but it looks like the release will arrive pretty soon. # 7th July 2009, 12:37 pm

How search.twitter.com uses Varnish. Includes examples of the configuration options they use. # 2nd March 2009, 5:08 pm