To supplement Bjørns answer a bit. Forward caching was never the intended use for Varnish so Varnish as a forward proxy is completely untested. Without knowing too much about the Squid codebase I expect quite a bit of it are workarounds for various bugs/quirks that IE6, Flash 9 and other weird clients have. In additions I'm certain there are optimisations for use cases we simply don't care about.
A simple thing such as cookies, which are more or less omnipresent, will completely disable Varnish, which is probably not something you want in a forward proxy. On paper, with a non-caching proxy to serve as a backend, it might work. But then again, there are pieces of software out there that are built specifically for this that will certainly provide a better solution. I think Squid is still seeing active development and it has a lot of relevant features (support for anti-malware plugins, native SSL support...). I think ATS is also meant to work as a forward proxy, but I'm not 100% sure. Per. On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 6:50 PM, Stephen Wood <[email protected]> wrote: > Can we clarify exactly why? My understanding is that varnish is a web > accelerator for a *website*, and in practice it will only cache for a > single domain. It can't be setup to cache for all domains. > > I can imagine you can get around this by using a varnish + squid pair, but > the performance would be unacceptable for an ISP. Not to mention that fact > that making varnish highly available and distributed is a lot of work on > its own. > > Can anyone on this list recommend a better solution to the original > question? > > > On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 1:42 AM, Per Buer <[email protected]>wrote: > >> >> >> >> On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 7:41 AM, Darshak Modi <[email protected] >> > wrote: >> >>> Hello, >>> >>> I want to deploy a cache server for small ISP. >>> From documents , I understand Varnish can be used for reverse-proxy only. >>> >>> I have to cache all world HTTP traffic, video traffic, updates for end >>> client who are using ISP internet. >>> Cache server to be deployed at ISP router end. I gone through Squid and >>> I think it can work. >>> >>> But I can not understand if Varnish can be used for the same purpose.? >>> >> >> No. >> >> Varnish isn't built for this. >> >> -- >> <http://www.varnish-software.com/> *Per Buer* >> CTO | Varnish Software >> Phone: +47 958 39 117 | Skype: per.buer >> We Make Websites Fly! >> >> Winner of the Red Herring Top 100 Global Award 2013 >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> varnish-misc mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/mailman/listinfo/varnish-misc >> > > > > -- > Stephen Wood > www.heystephenwood.com > -- <http://www.varnish-software.com/> *Per Buer* CTO | Varnish Software Phone: +47 958 39 117 | Skype: per.buer We Make Websites Fly! Winner of the Red Herring Top 100 Global Award 2013
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