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Saturday, September 24, 2016

Simple Basic Working VARNISH 4.0 Configuration: default.vcl and varnish.params for a functional HTTPD web server cache for LIGHTTPD


Ever since I started maintaining a free public IP address blocklist listing sources of brute-force attacks I am seeing and putting the list up on the lighttpd web-server for anyone to use, there has been a remarkable growth of traffic that lighttpd is being asked to service.

This blocklist is based on the jail contents of fail2ban, generated hourly from fail2ban jails using a cron job, that I describe here. My fail2ban setup including automated reporting to blocklist.de over email is documented here.

Though lighttpd is not overwhelmed yet, I decided to take some load off it and put a varnish server-side cache before it, working purely off an in-memory cache since all the web-server does is provide a static page and a hourly-updated bloc-klist.

With Varnish cache delivering web pages from memory, a load test via loader.io shows 57 milliseconds average response time with  0.0 % error rate for 100 to 250 clients over 1 minute. The varnishtop screenshot at the top was taken during this test.


It took some effort to configure varnish http cache to get it to work. Here are the configuration files for varnish reverse cache and lighttpd that I am using.

My lighttpd configuration gets lighttpd to bind to and listen on the localhost (127.0.0.1) IP address on port 65481. Varnishd uses this local lighttpd server and port as the backend and serves HTTP requests from external clients on the usual port 80 on the internet-facing interfaces.

The varnish configuration below is generic, i.e. it has no dependency on lighttpd - any httpd will work as the backend of Varnish as long as Varnish knows what IP and Port Number to use as the backend.

I am using varnish version 4.0.3 and lighttpd version 1.4.41.

# varnishd -V
varnishd (varnish-4.0.3 revision b8c4a34)
Copyright (c) 2006 Verdens Gang AS
Copyright (c) 2006-2014 Varnish Software AS
# lighttpd -V
lighttpd/1.4.41 (ssl) - a light and fast webserver
Build-Date: Aug  1 2016 14:19:06

Varnish 4.0 Configuration

/etc/varnish/default.vcl



/etc/varnish/varnish.params



Lighttpd Configuration


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