I've been playing around with varnish a little bit lately. I'm talking about the web accelerator software.

I have a TYPO3 site, and I think it's already pretty speedy since I use the nc_staticfilecache extension. But I want to lower my pageload time some more. So I've looked into various ways of doing that.

Varnish is something that is really easy to install. 

I understand that Nginx can accomplish the same type of web caching and acceleration that Varnish can, but I think that Varnish is way easier to get set up to cache a web site served by Apache. 

I've been doing a little testing of my web site being served solely by Apache, and being accelerated by varnish, mainly by using the webpagetest.org web site as a preliminary measurement tool for site speed, and I like what I see.

Both the web site served by Apache, and the varnish server, are on VPS from the same provider and they are in the same datacenter, so I feel that adds to the accuracy of the results in comparing the two. You know, you couldn't really isolate varnish as an independent variable if the servers were in different datacenters. But they are in the same place, Chicago.

So I think I'll  be using varnish to accelerate my web site. It's been really easy to set up. And since I use TYPO3, it's good to know that there are extensions in the TYPO3 extension repository that facilitate a TYPO3 integration with varnish. 

 I believe there are also plugins for Drupal, Wordpress, and other popular CMS that will help a webmaster integrate varnish as a way of accelerating their web sites.