Varnish

Varnish is a website accelerator, which has been gaining a lot in popularity in recent years, because it can increase the loading speed of any site, at times even by 100 percent, based on the content itself. This tool is sometimes called an HTTP reverse proxy as well and is used to lower the overall load on the server and to improve the browsing speed for the website visitors. Whenever a visitor opens a page on a certain Internet site, the browser request is handled by the web server and the requested content is served as a response. If Varnish is activated, it caches the web pages that the website visitor browses and if any of them is opened for a second time, it’s delivered by Varnish and not by the web server directly. The boost in the performance is due to the fact that the accelerator processes the browser requests tremendously faster than any web server, which leads to much faster browsing speeds for the visitors. If any data is modified in the meantime, the cached webpages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time someone tries to access them.