Varnish is a reverse proxy cache that can significantly speed up your Drupal website. In this talk, we’ll dive deep into the theory of how to use Varnish and also go through a hands-on demonstration of how to write VCL (Varnish Configuration Language), use the Varnish module to manage a Drupal 7 installation and see Varnish in action.

In addition, we’ll go into some advanced usages of Varnish, such as ESI and more-intelligent cache expiration.

A presentation given on the subject from the NYC Drupal meetup is available at http://prezi.com/fiifbaoxj0za/coat-your-website-in-varnish/. This session will include hands-on demonstration with example VCL to show Varnish in action.

Varnish is one component of high-performance hosting stack.