Introduction

The basics

Vinyl Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Vinyl Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.

Performance

Vinyl Cache performs really, really well. It is usually bound by the speed of the network, effectively turning performance into a non-issue. We’ve seen Vinyl Cache delivering 20 Gbps on regular off-the-shelf hardware.

Flexibility

One of the key features of Vinyl Cache, in addition to its performance, is the flexibility of its configuration language, VCL. It enables you to write policies on how incoming requests should be handled. In such a policy you can decide what content you want to serve, from where you want to get the content and how the request or response should be altered. And, you can extend Vinyl Cache with modules (VMODs). You can read more about this in our tutorial.

License and origin

Vinyl Cache is free software licensed under a two-clause BSD licence, also known as the FreeBSD license. The project was initiated in 2005 under the name Varnish Cache. Varnish Cache Cache 1.0 was released in september 2006. The name was changed between release 8.0 in September 2025 and the next release in March 2026 (see also Vinyl Cache has left github).

About this website

This site is statically generated. Powered by Sphinx running on Apache httpd on top of FreeBSD. It flies thanks to Vinyl Cache. :-)