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Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2012 23:04:07 +0200
From: Anders Nordby <anders@FreeBSD.org>
To: "Mikhail T." <mi+thun@aldan.algebra.com>
Message-ID: <20121001210407.GA10881@fupp.net>
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Cc: apache@FreeBSD.org, net@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Is it worth the effort to make proxy and server communicate via
 Unix socket?
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Hi,

On man, okt 01, 2012 at 12:24:19pm -0400, Mikhail T. wrote:
> In a fairly common setup today, a proxy (say, Varnish) runs on the same 
> system as the actual "backend" server (such as Apache).
> 
> Would it be worthwhile to alter them both to allow them to talk via a 
> socket instead of via TCP (on the lo0 interface)?
> 
> Or is the win just too negligible? Thanks!

I don't see the point. Varnish usually runs on separate servers. On a
small scale setup, the likely improvements would be negligible. The Varnish
developers also do not want Varnish to become a web server, it's just
not it's job.

Your time is better spent improving your cache hit ratio (% of requests
cached) as well as integrating purging with your content management
systems when caching dynamic pages.

If you are serving flat files only you may want to consider just using
lighttpd or nginx, which are known to be fast.

Regards,

-- 
Anders.