You say you don't parse a specific cookie, but doesn't extract a specific cookie as a cache key? The blog post says the opposite:
> We modified Passenger to parse cookies, and to vary turbocache responses based on the value of this user_id cookie. We invoke Passenger like this: passenger start --vary-turbocache-by-cookie user_id
In other words: parse the user_id cookie.
The mentioned commit even adds a ~250 LoC file (ext/common/ServerKit/CookieUtils.h) to do cookie parsing: https://github.com/phusion/passenger/commit/a760649cd79fde43...
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Anyway, what you're getting at is that Phusion only parses a certain value from the cookie and then uses it as a custom Vary header, whereas the examples I linked to clean up the Cookie header and then varies on that cleaned up Cookie header. That boils down to exactly the same thing.
P.S.: downvoting? Not very nice.