I’ve long been an advocate of origin HTTP caching and acceleration for large websites, something I alluded to in the post Performance Tuning and Optimization of High-Traffic Websites, which I wrote almost eleven months ago. In the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, many vendors like CacheFlow (later BlueCoat) and Nortel made HTTP caching appliances, but there are almost no such vendors in the marketplace now. I still believe there is a sound technical reason for an origin website architecture with HTTP accelerators deployed in front of it, and I’m happy to see that one recent entrant into this space, the Varnish HTTP Accelerator, is nearing a stable 2.0 release. In this post, I’ll elaborate on why I think HTTP caching solutions went the way of the dodo, why I think they should come back, and use the feature set and stated goals of the Varnish project as evidence. Continue reading…
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Those of you who have been following the CBC Radio Two revitalization have noticed that, buried amid all the controversy about juggling classical music so that it only appears between 10 a.m. – 3 p.m., CBC launched four web-only streams on Monday: Classical, Jazz, Canadian Songwriters, and Canadian Classical. These are available twenty-four hours a day, just like any other Internet radio station. Continue reading…
