status/usage of FRiCKLE/ngx_cache_purge. still reliable? alternatives?

[Reinis Rozitis]

> For some new WordPress sites, I'll be deploying fastcgi_cache as reverse 
> proxy / page cache, instead of usual Varnish.
>
> A commonly referenced approach is to use the 'FRiCKLE/ngx_cache_purge',
>
> https://github.com/FRiCKLE/ngx_cache_purge/
>
> ngx_cache_purge module development appears to have gone stale; no commits 
> since ~ 2014.


Works just fine just for the current nginx versions you need to apply this 
patch 
https://github.com/FRiCKLE/ngx_cache_purge/commit/c7345057ad5429617fc0823e92e3fa8043840cef.diff 
.
(or maybe the forked repo has allready this implemented).


There are some situations where nginx is "better" suited than Varnish.

In my case at one project we decided/had to switch to nginx caching from 
varnish because varnish (even you are using disk based (mmap/file) backend 
storage) has a memory overhead per cacheable object (like ~1Kb)

While 1Kb doesn't sound much when you start to have milions of objects it 
adds up and in this case even we had several terabytes of fast SSDs the 
actual bottleneck ended was there was not enough ram  - the instances had 
only limited 32 Gb so in general there couldnt be more than 33 milion cached 
objects. Nginx on the other on the same hardware deals with 800+ milion (and 
increasing) objects without a problem.


p.s. there is also obviously the ssl thing with varnish vs nginx .. but 
thats another topic.

rr