Configuring Varnish Cache for Magento Speed Optimization

As a Magento website owner, you want to make sure that your website speed is optimized. The good news is that there are several ways to do that, from image optimization to opting for a Magento 2 migration service. In today’s post, we’re here to talk about configuring the varnish cache as part of the Magento speed optimization services.

What is Varnish Cache?
Varnish Cache is kind of a reverse caching proxy that you put in front of your software. The Varnish Cache is meant to reduce the loading time on your website, application, or API. This is done by caching the server’s input which results in optimizing web performance.

A site’s performance differs when 10 users visit it versus 1 million visitors. There is bound to be a loading issue, which will affect the number of visitors visiting your website.

If your website isn’t performing well, then it will hurt your website’s ranking and drive people away when your website doesn’t load on time.

How does Varnish work?
Our Magento support team will configure your Varnish Cache feature on the website. You don’t have to worry about doing this yourself. However, it’s essential to know how this feature works so you understand its significance.

Once installed and started, Varnish will copy the behavior of the web server in the background. Speaking technically, Varnish listens on TCP port 80, which delivers HTTP—unless Varnish itself sits behind another proxy. It has one or more backends registered and will communicate with one of these backends if a result cannot be retrieved from the cache.

Varnish will take up a chunk of virtual memory and store its objects. These objects contain the HTTP response headers and the payload it gets from the backend. The objects stored in memory will be delivered to those requesting the corresponding HTTP resource. They are identified by a hash that is composed of the hostname or the IP address and the URL of the request.

Varnish is fast and depends on pthreads to handle a huge volume of incoming requests. The threading model and the use of memory for storage will significantly enhance the performance of your application. You need the right Magento speed optimization services to enable Varnish Cache to easily make your website 1,000 times faster.

What does Varnish use to control Cache?
Varnish uses VCL or Varnish Configuration Language to control the performance of the cache. VCL is a domain-specific language that offers hooks to skip and extend the behavior of the different states in the Varnish Finite State Machine. These hooks are a bunch of subroutines that exist in VCL. During the startup time, the VCL file is read, translated to C, compiled, and dynamically loaded in the form of a shared object.

Before things get too technical, let us add that this process of configuring Varnish Cache will greatly optimize your website. If you need Magento support to perform this task for you, contact us today.