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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Is anybody here using nginx as a REPLACEMENT for varnish ? I'm not an expert in devops, but will be deploying a webapp pretty soon - I was wondering if anyone is replacing varnish with nginx cache (memcached backed?)

nginx seems to be increasingly irreplaceable (with ssl caching,etc.) - so was looking to not having to deal with varnish.

I did some google searches, but was not able to find anything - including nginx configs, etc. Nginx Plus claims to be an accelerator, but again there isnt a lot of info around that.

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I've been using nginx+memcached for about 2 years on a high traffic site in production. It's been pretty great and runs without a hiccup. However bear in mind that Varnish is far more capable as nginx's memcached integration is fairly simplistic. You'll have to manage all your keys in the application layer as all nginx can do is send a certain request to a certain key and failover if it's not found. Varnish ACLs allow much finer control.

Also, I've come across benchmarks that say Varnish is faster. I just don't want to deal with a complex setup for something that gets the job done. (Job = lower the load on the app server)

Have not used NGINX cache, but are a heavy user of Varnish + NGINX. Varnish is really good at caching and together with NGINX it makes a solid solution. NGINX cache seems (from skimming the docs) simple and it might be enough for your requirements, with Varnish you know it can do a whole lot and more. As always, it depends.

If configured correctly, varnish's cache is lightning fast, and incredibly flexible. Nginx + memcached can make things really fast, but I've seen cases where the time to first byte can be 20-40% faster with a well-tuned Varnish instance (we're talking milliseconds, of course). (Sometimes, I imagine this may be due to the fact that bleeding-edge performance people are more familiar with Varnish, though...).

Nginx has been getting better, and I'm excited to see what happens over the next couple of years.

To get a more accurate response, I'd list a few use cases here. If you want better control over cache in general (expiration, purge, etc) or have strong gains (use-case specific) of using VCL or ESI its pretty hard to stay clear of using Varnish. Those are at least my caveats when choosing whether to include it or not in my stack.

Nginx+memc+cosistent_hashing+memcache :)

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