Top all-time · #3464
Varnish Software
Company blog · info.varnish-software.com/blogprogrammingsystemsweb
Varnish Software is the company blog at info.varnish-software.com, writing about programming, systems and web. Since 2015, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 113 times, most often “Speed up e-commerce sites by caching personalized (now cacheable) content”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters mostly cite Varnish Software posts as references on HTTP caching, request coalescing, Varnish features and Varnish history. A few comments judge individual posts directly.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Speed up e-commerce sites by caching personalized (now cacheable) content2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-06-19
- TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-13
- The agents are coming for the web and the web isn't ready2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-09-14
- /blog/hit-for-pass-varnish-cache2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-17
- Tech Preview: Edgestash – Making the Mobile Web Faster2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-02
- Varnish Extend: hybrid and private content delivery infrastructure2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-25
- How memory maps (mmap) deliver faster file access in Go2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-23
- How to prevent an entire class of cache vulnerability – the cache leak2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-18
- Varnish and Microservices: Introducing Zipnish2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-30
- Parallel ESI in Varnish2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-03
What Hacker News says?
Closed source, write up would be here: https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/introducing-varnish-t...
Comment linking /blog/introducing-varnish-total-encryption
on “SSH gets protection against side-channel attacks”Submitted TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish as a story · 349 points
HN discussionI'll echo what Simon said; we share some experiences here. There's a potential footgun, though, anyone getting started with this should know about- Request coalescing can be incredibly beneficial for cacheable content, but for uncacheable content you need to turn it off! Otherwise you'll cause your cache server to serialize requests to your backend for it. Let's imagine a piece of uncacheable content takes one secon…
Comment linking /blog/hit-for-miss-and-why-a-null-ttl-is-bad-for-you
on “The 5-Hour CDN”Submitted How memory maps (mmap) deliver faster file access in Go as a story · 141 points
HN discussionExcellent tour through this topic, here's my best attempt at a tl;dr summary: 1. write a 'Hello World' HTTP server to show how Tokio's async-Rust primitives work for epoll-based I/O; 2. show how the tracing crate ecosystem works to inspect and debug async-runtime tasks; 3. play with converting traces to OpenTelemetry, tokio-console, etc. for different views of the collected data; 4. play with hyper and axum to build…
Comment linking /blog/hit-for-pass-varnish-cache
on “Request Coalescing in Async Rust”Submitted Deno Under TinyKVM in Varnish as a story · 100 points
HN discussionAnd no support for HTTP/2 until recently. They're suggesting Hitch for SSL termination now. [1]: https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/varnish-cache-5-http2... Edit: Apache also has caching/does it all in one package; they're even contemplating a module for certbot (in addition to or as replacement for the official certbot/letsencrypt Python package for Apache)
Comment linking /blog/varnish-cache-5-http2-support
on “Mastering HTTP Caching – from request to response and everything”Submitted Writing Varnish modules in Rust as a story · 81 points
HN discussionThis is how many HTTP caches and CDNs work. The terminology used to describe it is often request collapsing or request coalescing. Some examples: * varnish: https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/hit-for-pass-varnish-... * nginx: http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#pro... * fastly: https://docs.fastly.com/guides/performance-tuning/request-co... * cloudfront: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonClo…
Comment linking /blog/hit-for-pass-varnish-cache
on “Thundering Herds and Promises”Submitted How to Use Varnish Cache as Secured AWS S3 Gateway as a story · 54 points
HN discussion* Take a look at this blog post [0]. That can cover a lot of different security scenarios. The next step would be linking in an external system (database, API, etc) to better track more complex security policies. * Standard Varnish usecase, nothing extra needed. * https://github.com/varnish/varnish-modules vsthrottle [0] https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/using-varnish-cache-s...
Comment linking /blog/using-varnish-cache-secured-aws-s3-gateway
on “Varnish Explained”Submitted Tech Preview: Edgestash – Making the Mobile Web Faster as a story · 32 points
HN discussionI borderline love Varnish cache, but the way the open source and commercial versions have diverged and all the nice features only go into the $10k/yr+ commercial version sucks. Features like the memory governer [0], because trying to predict how much memory (open-source) Varnish will use is an absolute PITA and a sure-fire way to run out of memory if you're not careful. My clients can't justify the commercial licens…
Comment linking /blog/two-minute-tech-tuesdays-memory-governor
on “Deno Under TinyKVM in Varnish”Submitted Varnish and Microservices: Introducing Zipnish as a story · 30 points
HN discussionInteresting; I'd love to read _what_ exactly they send in those long HTTP requests. I'd think something along the lines of Surrogate Keys/Cache Tags would make sense: - https://www.drupal.org/developing/api/8/cache/tags - http://info.varnish-software.com/blog/advanced-cache-invalid... (ugh, they broke their site, cached at https://pinboard.in/cached/a31c4630dd2d/ ) - https://www.fastly.com/blog/surrogate-keys-part-1…
Comment linking /blog/advanced-cache-invalidation-strategies
on “Thinking in GraphQL”Submitted Varnish Cache and Brotli compression as a story · 27 points
HN discussionHow wrong can one comment be? You might want to read this post on the founding of Varnish https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/history-varnish-cache... And Fastly would certainly disagree that it’s only useful for PHP as they built a whole company based on Varnish
Comment linking /blog/history-varnish-cache-10-years
on “Make Your Own CDN with NetBSD”Submitted Varnish and Cache Poisoning as a story · 26 points
HN discussionThat's really neat that you can do the authentication/authorization headers within Varnish. I'd still use CloudFront instead, which gives you these features plus the advantage of having global edge servers, and support for TLS/SSL (not sure about the http/2 part). Although the one advantage this has is the cache can stop you from having to leave your external network to return a file (vs going to CloudFront or S3).…
Comment linking /blog/how-implement-ssltls-varnish-plus
on “How to Use Varnish Cache as Secured AWS S3 Gateway”Submitted Varnish Cache Meltdown Performance as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI was spec-ing out Varnish for a project recently and was really impressed with what it could do. The stale-while-revalidate approach (immediately serve data past the `ttl` for a `grace` period while asynchronously refreshing it) keeps data flowing. It can `keep` data past the `grace` period and serve that when the origin goes down or use that in conditional requests (If-Modified-Since) to the origin to prevent fetc…
Comment linking /blog/request-coalescing-and-other-reasons-to-use-varnish-as-an-origin-shield
on “Your Cache Headers Could Probably be More Aggressive”Submitted The agents are coming for the web and the web isn't ready as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted Announcing Varnish Cash Blockchain as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Varnish in the cloud with AWS as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bandwidth shaping with Varnish Cache as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted 20 Years of Varnish: A Cloud-Native Distribution (In-Core TLS, K8s Gateway API) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to prevent an entire class of cache vulnerability – the cache leak as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Replacing Adobe AEM (CQ5) Dispatcher with Varnish Plus Part Two as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to configure saint and grace modes in Varnish 4.1 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Speed up e-commerce sites by caching personalized (now cacheable) content as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
