What is the best way to cache static contents?

4extramails · 2014-01-13T21:07:54+00:00

Hello! On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 11:19 AM, develephant.net wrote: > I am installing the latest release 1.5.8.1 and I am getting the following > error wh...

What is the best way to cache static contents?

4extramails

Hello,

I have been searching and exploring some good options to cache the static contents like js,css,images. Which one is the good reverse proxy caching option to cache the static contents varnish or Nginx proxy cache or anything else? Basically how does CDN hosting provider caches the contents for faster delivery?

I read few blogs of cloudflare, they provide some good options to their customers to set the edge side caching headers and browser side caching headers. What(software) does cloudflare use to cache the static contents and how could they set different headers for edge side and browser side caching?

Is it possible to use memcache and srcache module of Nginx for this purpose?

Thanks,

brian

Cloudflare uses nginx, AFAIK. Depending on the size of your site, I'd just use a third party - like cloud flare, Fastly, etc - to do it rather than doing it yourself.

agentzh

Hello!

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 5:07 AM, Makailol wrote:
> I read few blogs of cloudflare, they provide some good options to their
> customers to set the edge side caching headers and browser side caching
> headers. What(software) does cloudflare use to cache the static contents

We use a customized version of Nginx's proxy_cache to cache pages.

> and
> how could they set different headers for edge side and browser side caching?
>

We use the ngx_lua module to do such complicated business logic in CDN:

    https://github.com/chaoslawful/lua-nginx-module

The CDN (and also WAF) is essentially driven by OpenResty.

> Is it possible to use memcache and srcache module of Nginx for this purpose?
>

Yes, sure, as long as all the things you want to cache can be held in
the memory.

Regards,
-agentzh

4extramails

Hello

Brian and agentzh thanks for your suggestions.

I have checked the fastly and found that they are using varnish to cache the contents. And I don't think if they are using Nginx/apache as backend to varnish instead they might be fetching the content from the origin site and caching it with varnish directly. They also allow to upload/change custom vcl logic to the customers. I think this way user can set different caching header's TTL for varnish and browser.

@agentzh, has nginx provide built in support for cache purge? In varnish there is built in support for purge and ban.

Also I would like to know which one is better Nginx or varnish to cache js/css/image? I am already using Nginx as a loadbalancer proxy server.

Thanks,

On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 10:17:53 AM UTC+5:30, agentzh wrote:

Hello!

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 5:07 AM, Makailol wrote:
> I read few blogs of cloudflare, they provide some good options to their
> customers to set the edge side caching headers and browser side caching
> headers. What(software) does cloudflare use to cache the static contents

We use a customized version of Nginx's proxy_cache to cache pages.

> and
> how could they set different headers for edge side and browser side caching?
>

We use the ngx_lua module to do such complicated business logic in CDN:

https://github.com/chaoslawful/lua-nginx-module

The CDN (and also WAF) is essentially driven by OpenResty.

> Is it possible to use memcache and srcache module of Nginx for this purpose?
>

Yes, sure, as long as all the things you want to cache can be held in
the memory.

Regards,
-agentzh