speed up symfony2 application with varnish

Hi everyone,

Just a quick note about Varnish integration for symfony. I’m sure you have heard of Varnish reverse proxy server.

Varnish is a web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind. It’s modern architecture gives it a significantly better performance than many of it’s competing products. Varnish store web pages in memory so the web servers don’t have to create the same web page over and over again. The web server only recreate a page when it is changed. Additionally Varnish can serve web pages much faster then any application server is capable of – giving the website a significant speed up.

So in first order you may be interested to integrate Varnish to handle pages which don’t require authentication (for myself I’m still not sure if there is any advantage for integrating pages for logged in users):

  
sub vcl_recv {
    set req.http.Surrogate-Capability = "abc=ESI/1.0";
}
sub vcl_fetch {
    if (beresp.http.Surrogate-Control ~ "ESI/1.0") {
        unset beresp.http.Surrogate-Control;
        set beresp.do_esi = true;
    }
}
  

Symfony2's cache uses the standard HTTP cache headers, the Symfony2 Reverse Proxy can easily be replaced with any other reverse proxy. Varnish is a powerful, open-source, HTTP accelerator capable of serving cached content quickly and including support for Edge Side Includes.