How to use varnish/squid with IIS/ASP.NET website?

Question

I am working on a website with lots of images (think smugmug/flickr) and from what I read, flickr is using squid as the image cache. My images will be stored on Amazon S3, so a caching server will help saving the hosting money as well. I'd like to hear ideas on it is do-able with the following configuration.

1. My ASP.NET/MVC application running on a dedicated windows server.
2. varnish running on a seperate linux server from SliceHost.com or Linode.com (most likely I want to cache the smaller-size thumbnails so a small VPS should be good).

Is this do-able? Should I point the domain name to the server running varnish?

Thanks!

Answer 1

We just placed a Fedora linux server in front of our IIS/Windows Server. It's running a combination of Varnish and Nginx and it's working like a dream.

On Varnish you can selectively cache different file types, directories, or just pass through.

The only down-side is that it doesn't support SSL. So we installed Nginx to handle the reverse proxy for SSL. No caching but works great!

So, it is very do-able and by my metrics we've increased our capacity by 66%.

My only advice is to test test test and become intimate with the VCL.