nginx serving static files - caching?

[revirii]

Hi,

we want to establish some service that will deliver static files
(images) with a size between 1-120 KB. The service should handle (at the
moment) ~130.000.000 requests per month, so not that few and not
extremly many requests. The to-be-served files have a size of several
hundred GBs in total. Some of the files (5-10%) are asked more
frequently and the bigger part less frequently.

Let's say we have 16 GB Ram available for the server. We could simply
avoid using some caching mechanism and read the files from disk. For my
scenario: is it possible to establish some reasonable caching? No
decision regarding the to-be-used technology is made so far. An
associate favours varnish (with some webserver as backend) and some
least recently used strategy, i'd give nginx+memcached a try. Any
recommendations?

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,150069,150069#msg-150069