Skip to content
Back to top

# The Vinyl Cache Users Guide

The Vinyl Cache documentation consists of three main documents:

- The Vinyl Cache Tutorial explains the basics and gets you started with Vinyl Cache.

- The Vinyl Cache Users Guide (this document), explains how Vinyl Cache works and how you can use it to improve your website.

- The Vinyl Cache Reference Manual contains hard facts and is useful for looking up specific questions.

After The Big Vinyl Cache Picture, this Users Guide is organized in sections following the major interfaces to Vinyl Cache as a service:

Starting and running Vinyl Cache is about getting Vinyl Cache configured, with respect to storage, sockets, security and how you can control and communicate with Vinyl Cache once it is running.

VCL - Vinyl Configuration Language is about getting Vinyl Cache to handle the HTTP requests the way you want, what to cache, how to cache it, modifying HTTP headers etc. etc.

Reporting and statistics explains how you can monitor what Vinyl Cache does, from a transactional level to aggregating statistics.

Vinyl Cache and Website Performance is about tuning your website with Vinyl Cache.

Troubleshooting Vinyl Cache is for locating and fixing common issues with Vinyl Cache.

- The Big Vinyl Cache Picture
- Starting and running Vinyl Cache
  - Security first
  - Required command line arguments
  - CLI - bossing Vinyl Cache around
  - Storage backends
  - Transient Storage
  - Parameters
  - Sizing your cache
- VCL - Vinyl Configuration Language
  - VCL Syntax
  - Built-in VCL
  - Request and response VCL objects
  - Backend servers
  - The “none” backend
  - Multiple backends
  - Backends and virtual hosts in Vinyl Cache
  - Connecting Through a Proxy
  - Directors
  - Health checks
  - Layering
  - Director Resolution
  - Connection Pooling
  - Hashing
  - Grace mode and keep
  - Separate VCL files
  - Using inline C to extend Vinyl Cache
  - VCL Examples
  - Device detection
- Reporting and statistics
  - Logging in Vinyl Cache
  - Statistics
- Vinyl Cache and Website Performance
  - Achieving a high hitrate
  - The role of HTTP Headers
  - HTTP Vary
  - Cache misses
  - Uncacheable content
  - Purging and banning
  - Compression
- Content composition with Edge Side Includes
  - Example: esi:include
  - Example: esi:remove and <!–esi … –>
  - What happens when it fails ?
  - Can an ESI fragment also use ESI-includes ?
  - Doing ESI on JSON and other non-XML’ish content
  - Ignoring BOM in ESI objects
  - ESI on invalid XML
  - ESI includes with HTTPS protocol
  - ESI on partial responses (206)
  - ESI and return(vcl(…))
  - ESI and gzip compression
- Troubleshooting Vinyl Cache
  - When Vinyl Cache won’t start
  - Vinyl Cache is crashing - panics
  - Vinyl Cache is crashing - stack overflows
  - Vinyl Cache is crashing - segmentation faults
  - Vinyl Cache gives me Guru meditation
  - Vinyl Cache doesn’t cache