Varnish your PHP application, make it fly!

Quite possibly the most useful and interesting talk of the day!

Best talk of the day, hopefully there will be some more talks of the same calibre. I'm not sure about choosing Ajax requests over ESIs for snippets of page content that shouldn't be cached (such as a shopping basket's product count); it feels like coding the application around the caching solution. Food for thought, in any case. Thanks for the great talk.

Great talk... Would be fantastic to have a varnish extension for mahento.

This was the most interesting talk of the day for me. I have worked on a number of Magento projects over the last few years and can definitely relate to the speed frustrations hinted at. Varnish looks like a very flexible and easy to set up solution to these problems and I will definitely be giving this a look.

The delivery of the talk was also very clearly done and the speaker obviously knew the content well. If I had to pick out a bad point there was probably a few too many "erms" in the delivery of the talk however this is a very minor point and the talk was no less informative.

Thanks for a great talk"

Very interesting talk for a bloke that obviously knows a lot about the subject. Well delivered and some very useful slides. Didn't quite manage to get the links in time though as he went on to the slide telling us that iBuildings are recruiting but I'll let him off because I am looking for a job!!!

I loved how the topic started but I could have done with having more of a general overview of what ESI was (as the subject is new to me), I would have also liked to know how varnish compares to other popular cache technology such as squid.

Overall, the talk gave me plenty to think about and try, and lots more to learn :)

Good stuff, but i agree with other comment could have done with more of an overiew of esi and implementation

Okay talk, but could have been better with more graphs of with varnish vs without varnish. Also more examples than just magento (which I personally do not care for) would have been nice.

Was a bit shocked by the "Just use AJAX to update the dynamic info once the page is loaded" comment. Apparently the speaker doesn't care about people who have javascript disabled in their browser for whatever reason.

Great stuff. Practical examples of how the technology can help, and how it can also hinder which is equally as valuable. I appreciate that the technical feat of achieving such a velocity of traffic for 'a major high street retailer' is huge, it would perhaps have been better to show that feat as a comparison to the traffic before Varnish.

Time permitting, it would have also been great to hear a bit more about the load balancing that Varnish does between servers, and what it takes to set that up.

Looking forward to poring over the slides and having a good go at tweaking my own configurations though: inspring stuff.

A useful introduction to Varnish. I do think a little too much time was given over to the ESI functionality, and I would have liked to see a bigger focus on use cases / real world examples.

A really useful talk, very practical and full of real-world examples. I left with loads of ideas. The speaker was good, very clear and focused.

Presentation was enjoyable and the speaker presented his talk very well, but the content of the presentation could have done with more (real-world) benchmarks. Some examples of the performance improvements for other often-used packages would have been a bonus.

I found this really useful and I think out of all the talks I saw this will certainly benefit me the most. There are several upcoming projects I've got my eye on to try out Varnish with, and yes they are all Magento! I personally would have liked to go further into integration with Magento but appreciate that it would not be relevant to everyone and there was an hour limit on the talk. I thought the talk was delivered really well, thanks!

I agree with other commenters here about the detail on this one, especially where the coverage deviated (with reason) to the common pitfalls of other caching methods.

Well paced and interesting throughout.

Enjoyed this talk, good to hear from someone who had put Varnish to use on a heavy traffic site with some impressive stats showing the difference it made. Good explanation of the various caching headers and how they work both with and without Varnish in the mix.

Disclaimer: we are colleague and we worked together on a big Magento based projects.

The most exiting thing for me about the talk has been watching the numbers as a result of the effort we, but mostly Alistair, put together to make that eCommerce flies. However I have also to remark how well Alistair presented the topic without hesitations, covering most of the relevant aspects and answering also with proper competence technical questions raised by the crowd.

As a Varnish newbie I found this talk very interesting. Good overview of what Varnish does and how it does it.

Did seem to disregard some of the problems of Varnish without fully explaining how they could be avoided. Good introductory talk, not sure how much experienced users would have got from it.

I've heard about Varnish, and knew roughly what it did but hadnt really looked into it before, so this talk was perfect for me.

A quick overview of what it is/does and then tip on getting started and some of the limitations.

Am looking forward to testing it out on a few projects.