Varnish Cache is a powerful open source HTTP web accelerator, aka cashing reverse HTTP proxy, which is designed to significantly improve your application performance. Varnish boosts your Magento store by cashing a copy of the page in memory the first time a user browse through that page and then delivers a cached response immediately after it is required again. What this means is you can generate much more traffic and your store’s performance and scalability will go through the floors, roof and back door.
The thing about low risk investments and fast return is that it makes people feel more confident and cheerful as a morale booster. Varnish is committed to providing the most cost effective solutions to traditional CDN services for web acceleration.
As soon as Varnish is in the ready mode you can diminish the amount of web servers supporting your website by up to 85% and accelerate responses to HTTP requests innovating the way to save on server maintenance. Varnish runs faster than any web server, so you make sure to have Varnish fulfill mounting number of requests directly from the cache because every second counts.
Varnish determines whether it can answer the request or not based on the cacheable assets obtained from the backend server. If the request is fulfilled, the backend enables Varnish to cache any following requests for those assets with the HTTP response header which means that requests don’t go to the web server.
This is all very enlightening, but there are certain exclusions and limitations subjected to Varnish, the most profound one being the use of cookies. Since cookies represent a client- identification functionality, Varnish will bypass them and report directly to the backend, retrieve the response, store it in the cache and handle client requests.
Performance
Varnish is as fast as cheetah in African savanna. Depending on Varnish you can get up to 1000x improvements in sustaining concurrent transactions per second. Varnish brings greater flexibility and control allowing you to customize software to the developing needs and conditions of the industry. Varnish performance is defined by the data transfer rate, thus you can allow yourself to provide the main focus for the content and leave performance and scalability to the expert.
Flexibility
Apart from its performance enhancements, Varnish Cache gives you access to advanced features like highly flexible domain-specific configuration language, VCL. VCL defines document caching policies and how incoming requests and outgoing responses should be handled. In an adopted policy you can declare what content you want to deliver, from where you normally obtain the content and how the request should be modified to respond to altered circumstances.
Customer Satisfaction
A faster Magento shop and quick loading will have a powerful positive effect on your customer satisfaction, conversion rate and revenue, ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. Complying with whatever amount of visitors or requests there might be, Varnish Cache helps your site to keep up with the demand.
Multi Server
You can implement one or more varnish server to enable high availability cluster processing solution. If connection to the server fails, Varnish Cache take over the control of the cached content.
Purging
Carrying out a purge is when you fetch an object from the cache directory and clear it off altogether with its variations. Catalog, Product info, CMS pages and blocks, specific store or URL are purged automatically when you carry out meaningful processing tasks in the admin maintaining a website.
Excluded Routes
By default (without Varnish) the shopping cart, checkout, payment gateway, customer area are not cached. The route exclusions for Varnish Cache can be configured in the Magento backend.
Cache Lifetime
You can choose a specific cache lifetime for specific routes. Usually CMS pages have a higher performance caching than product detail pages.
Install Varnish for Magento 2 with a minimal set of parameters and test that it works properly. Then you’ll transfer a Varnish configuration from the Magento Admin and test it again.
The process include the following:
- Install Varnish and test it by opening any Magento page to see if you’re receiving HTTP response headers that indicate Varnish is running.
- Install the Magento software and use the Magento Admin to generate a Varnish (VCLs) configuration file that starts Varnish.
- Switch your existing Varnish configuration file with the one provided by the Admin.
- Test everything again.
Related: Install Varnish for Magento 1
Varnish Cache is beneficial both to users who need assistance to perform basic functions and to advanced users who have great expertise in the technicalities, and invest all their time and resources to create customized modules.
