Can NGinx replace Varnish

[António P. P. Almeida]

On 14 Nov 2012 15h31 CET, nginx-forum at nginx.us wrote:

> We are using Varnish in front of 3 load balanced web servers running
> apache.  We had migrated from one hosting platform where we had 1
> app server and 1 database server using Varnish (Drupal 6.x) and had
> no issues.  Now that we are running in a load balanced environment
> (3 load balanced apache web servers, a Varnish server, and 1
> database server) we are seeing mulitple examples of cacheing
> issues. (Pages not displaying correctly ...style issues, data input
> staying cached and used on another page, etc).

You can drop Varnish from the picture if something like microcaching
suits you or you use ngx_cache_purge with the purge module. It depends
if you have an active invalidation strategy or not. Either way Nginx
can replace Varnish and work also as load balancer. So you'll have a
simpler stack.

> We think we can just replace the Varnish server and use a NGinx
> server.  I don't want to necessarily remove all the apache servers,
> but we have to get this cacheing issue corrected....
>
> any thoughts...?

Yep. See above. For Drupal related Nginx issues there's a GDO group:

http://groups.drupal.org/nginx

if want to delve deeper into the issue.

--- appa