Varnish Cache for Magento

What Is Varnish Cache

Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content intensive web sites. It stores data in virtual memory and leaves the task of deciding what is stored in memory and what gets paged out to disk to the operating system(apache).
Simply said, Varnish is a client side proxy server.

How It Works

Web Requests on a Server Without Varnish

Multiple PHP threads and database connections may produce high CPU consumption and increase response latency.

Web Requests on a Server With Varnish

Web requests will most often produce the same repeated response. In which case the response should be cached and servered quickly without consuming additional resources. In the case that a response has not been cached, the request is allowed to pass through to necessary resources in order to produce a cacheable response.

Using Varnish with Magento

Varnish and Magento are made for each other. As the magento stores are highly content driven in nature, the load issues are common to most businesses with large consumer base. Varnish helps Magento stores give better load performance and decreases the risk of abandoned carts, distressed user attention and provides stable performance thereby increasing sales.

Figure above shows considerable performance benefit with Varnish installed on webserver. Hence we strongly recommend Varnish for Magento.