Today, I installed Varnish Cache onto my Amazon EC2 server to test drive it's performance. I had recently discovered sites such as Facebook are using Varnish as a way of delivering the billions of photo requests they receive daily; which must mean this thing can really take the load of of standard http servers. Unfortunately I was unable to find a decent tutorial on how to do so, which led me to write my own.
To start with, you should know that I'm currently working with the default Amazon AMI install, which is pretty much a basic CentOS install as far as I can tell. Things shouldn't be much different for other version of Linux, such as Ubuntu or FreeBSD. I should also note that Varnish is currently not compatible with Windows platforms, which is annoying for me as I use a Windows test server at home, and at work.
Let's get started. First of all you're going to have to configure your Apache server to run from a different port. The examples below show port 8080, but you can choose any port you like.
Listen 8080
ServerName marcqualie.com