Vinyl HTTP Cache (formerly known as Varnish) is a web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind. Its modern architecture gives it a significantly better performance. Vinyl stores web pages in memory so the web servers do not have to create the same web page repeatedly. The web server only recreates a page when it is changed. When content is served from memory this happens a lot faster then anything.
Additionally Vinyl can serve web pages much faster then any application server is capable of – giving the website a significant speed enhancement.
It uses the advanced features in Linux 2.6, FreeBSD 6/7 and Solaris 10 to achieve its high performance. For a cost-effective configuration, Vinyl uses between 1-16GB and a SSD disk.
Key Features
- Modern design.
- VCL – a very flexible configuration language. The VCL configuration is translated to C, compiled, loaded and executed giving flexibility and speed.
- Load balancing using both a round-robin and a random director, both with a per-backend weighting.
- DNS, Random, Hashing and Client IP based Directors.
- Load balance between multiple backends.
- Support for Edge Side Includes including stitching together compressed ESI fragments.
- Heavily threaded.
- URL rewriting.
- Cache multiple vhosts with a single Vinyl.
- Log data is stored in shared memory.
- Basic health-checking of backends.
- Graceful handling of “dead” backends.
- Administered by a command line interface.
- Use In-line C to extend Vinyl.
- Can be used on the same system as Apache.
- Run multiple Vinyl on the same system.
- Support for HAProxy’s PROXY protocol. This is a protocol adds a small header on each incoming TCP connection that describes who the real client is, added by (for example) an SSL terminating process.
- Warm and cold VCL states.
- Plugin support with Vinyl Modules, called VMODs.
- Backends defined through VMODs.
- Gzip Compression and Decompression.
- HTTP Streaming Pass & Fetch.
- Saint and Grace mode. Saint Mode allows for unhealthy backends to be blacklisted for a period of time, preventing them from serving traffic when using Vinyl as a load balancer. Grace mode allows Vinyl to serve an expired version of a page or other asset in cases where Varnish is unable to retrieve a healthy response from the backend.
- Experimental support for Persistent Storage, without LRU eviction.
Website: vinyl-cache.org
Support: Documentation
Developer: Vinyl Software
License: BSD-2-Clause
Vinyl is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Web Caches | |
|---|---|
| Vinyl/a> | Web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind |
| HAProxy | High availability load balancer and proxy server |
| nginx | Very powerful and efficient web server and reverse proxy |
| Traffic Server | High-performance building block for cloud services |
| Memcached | Distributed memory object caching system |
| Squid | High-performance proxy caching server and web cache daemon |
| Envoy | High performance edge and service proxy |
| nuster | High-performance HTTP proxy cache server |
| Apache | Hugely popular web server with caching modules |
| Souin | HTTP cache system |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Web Delivery Tools | |
|---|---|
| Vinyl HTTP Cache | Web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind |
| Squid | High-performance proxy caching server and web cache daemon |
| Tinyproxy | Lightweight web proxy daemon |
| Privoxy | Non-caching Web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities |
| Polipo | Caching HTTP proxy which has modest resource needs |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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