Tux, Varnish or Squid? [closed]

In my experience varnish is much faster than squid, but equally importantly it's much less of a black box than squid is. Varnish gives you access to very detailed logs that are useful when debugging problems. It's configuration language is also much simpler and much more powerful that squid's.

@Daniel, @MKUltra, to elaborate on Varnish's supposed problems with cookies, there aren't really any. It is completely normal not to cache a request if it returns a cookie with it. Cookies are mostly meant to be used to distinguish different user preferences, so I don't think one would want to cache these (especially if you they include some secret information like a session id or a password!).

If you server sends cookies with your .js and images, that's a problem on your backend side, not on Varnish's side. As referenced by @Daniel (link provided), you can force the caching of these files anyway, thanks to the really cool language/DSL integrated in Varnish...

If you're looking to push static images and a lot of them, you may want to look at some basics first.

Your application should ensure that all correct headers are being passed, Cache-Control and Expires for example. That should result in the clients browsers caching those images locally and cutting down on your request count.

Use a CDN (if it's in your budget), this brings the images closer to your clients (generally) and will result in a better user experience for them. For the CDN to be a productive investment you'll again need to make sure all your necessary caching headers are properly set, as per the point I made in the previous paragraph.

After all that if you are still going to use a reverse proxy, I recommend using nginx in proxy mode, over Varnish and squid. Yes Varnish is fast, and as fast as nginx, but what you're wanting to do is really quite simple, Varnish comes into it's own when you want to do complex caching, and ESI. So Keep It Simple, Stupid. nginx will do your job very nicely indeed.

I have no experience with Tux, so I can't comment on it sorry.