Newspaper develops groundbreaking HTTP accelerator
Newspaper Index recently moved to a faster and better 64bit server in order to handle our growing traffic. To make sure that our users get pages in time even when we are slashdotted we looked around for some caching software in adition to the hardware improvements.
Hilli, who handles the server, suggested the cool new application Varnish HTTP accelerator and it is actually serving these pages you are browsing right now. It is extremely fast, the server is doing nada and the only bottleneck right now is the 100 MB backbone - or so it seems. There are competitors out there, but Varnish beeing an BSD license open source application, is outperforming them all. Varnish is ten to twenty times faster than the Squid Web Proxy Cache and even the commercial accelerators are far behind.
The funny thing about Varnish is that the development is sponsored by the Norwegian newspaper VG. They had as the largest online newspapers in Norway (I think the largest in Scandinavia) constant problems with heavy traffic loads. In 2005 they initiated the development of an application written from scratch that could accelerate/cache their web content. The wellknown BSD-programmer Poul-Henning Kamp got involved together with the Norwegian Linpro and in a few months they build Varnish. Now it is running on VG’s servers. VG had 12 servers but now they can handle all the traffic on one server, thanks to Varnish - and they still have not had enough trafic to test the limits! VG.no has Alexa Rank 1584 today.
But why does a newspapers support the development of free open source software? Anders Berg from VG Multimedia said earlier this year to linmag.no:
“We are enjoying open source sofware and we see this (supporting Varnish) as a great way to give a little back to the community.”
He estimates that Varnish will save VG about 150.000 USD a year in reduced hardware expenses - Nearly the same as the price for building Varnish. Using the commercial alternative Akamai would have costed VG many times that sum.
Poul-Henning is not sure if he can tell who, but he says that at least two of the danish top-ten websites are now using Varnish and the application is beeing picked up right now all over the world.
Thanks to the innovative team VG, Poul-Henning and Linpro!
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