Readability of the C source code generated from VCL code has been improved.
Equality (==) and inequality (!=) operators have been implemented for IP addresses (which previously could only be compared using ACLs).
The address of the listening socket on which the client connection was received is now available to VCL as the server.ip variable.
Each object's hash key is now computed based on a string which is available to VCL as req.hash. A VCL hook named vcl_hash has been added to allow VCL scripts to control hash generation (for instance, whether or not to include the value of the Host: header in the hash).
The setup code for listening sockets has been modified to detect and handle situations where a host name resolves to multiple IP addresses. It will now attempt to bind to each IP address separately, and report a failure only if none of them worked.
Network or protocol errors that occur while retrieving an object from a backend server now result in a synthetic error page being inserted into the cache with a 30-second TTL. This should help avoid driving an overburdened backend server into the ground by repeatedly requesting the same object.
The child process will now drop root privileges immediately upon startup. The user and group to use are specified with the user and group run-time parameters, which default to nobody and nogroup, respectively. Other changes have been made in an effort to increase the isolation between parent and child, and reduce the impact of a compromise of the child process.
Objects which are received from the backend with a Vary: header are now stored separately according to the values of the headers specified in Vary:. This allows Varnish to correctly cache e.g. compressed and uncompressed versions of the same object.
Each Varnish instance now has a name, which by default is the host name of the machine it runs on, but can be any string that would be valid as a relative or absolute directory name. It is used to construct the name of a directory in which the server state as well as all temporary files are stored. This makes it possible to run multiple Varnish instances on the same machine without conflict.
When invoked with the -C option, varnishd will now not just translate the VCL code to C, but also compile the C code and attempt to load the resulting shared object.
Attempts by VCL code to reference a variable outside its scope or to assign a value to a read-only variable will now result in compile-time rather than run-time errors.
The new command-line option -F will make varnishd run in the foreground, without enabling debugging.
New VCL variables have been introduced to allow inspection and manipulation of the request sent to the backend (bereq.request, bereq.url, bereq.proto and bereq.http) and the response to the client (resp.proto, resp.status, resp.response and resp.http).
Statistics from the storage code (including the amount of data and free space in the cache) are now available to varnishstat and other statistics-gathering tools.
Objects are now kept on an LRU list which is kept loosely up-to-date (to within a few seconds). When cache runs out, the objects at the tail end of the LRU list are discarded one by one until there is enough space for the freshly requested object(s). A VCL hook, vcl_discard, is allowed to inspect each object and determine its fate by returning either keep or discard.
A new VCL hook, vcl_deliver, provides a chance to adjust the response before it is sent to the client.
A new management command, vcl.show, displays the VCL source code of any loaded configuration.
A new VCL variable, now, provides VCL scripts with the current time in seconds since the epoch.
A new VCL variable, obj.lastuse, reflects the time in seconds since the object in question was last used.
VCL scripts can now add an HTTP header (or modify the value of an existing one) by assigning a value to the corresponding variable, and strip an HTTP header by using the remove keyword.
VCL scripts can now modify the HTTP status code of cached objects (obj.status) and responses (resp.status)
Numeric and other non-textual variables in VCL can now be assigned to textual variables; they will be converted as needed.
VCL scripts can now apply regular expression substitutions to textual variables using the regsub function.
A new management command, status, returns the state of the child.
Varnish will now build and run on Mac OS X.
This is a new utility which sends a single command to a Varnish server's management port and prints the result to stdout, greatly simplifying the use of the management port from scripts.
The user interface has been greatly improved; the histogram will be automatically rescaled and redrawn when the window size changes, and it is updated regularly rather than at a rate dependent on the amount of log data gathered. In addition, the name of the Varnish instance being watched is displayed in the upper right corner.
In addition to client traffic, varnishncsa can now also process log data from backend traffic.
A bug that would cause varnishncsa to segfault when it encountered an empty HTTP header in the log file has been fixed.
This new utility will attempt to recreate the HTTP traffic which resulted in the raw Varnish log data which it is fed.
Don't print lifetime averages when it doesn't make any sense—for instance, there is no point in dividing the amount in bytes of free cache space by the lifetime in seconds of the varnishd process.
The user interface has been greatly improved; varnishstat will no longer print more than fits in the terminal, and will respond correctly to window resize events. The output produced in one-shot mode has been modified to include symbolic names for each entry. In addition, the name of the Varnish instance being watched is displayed in the upper right corner in curses mode.
The user interface has been greatly improved; varnishtop will now respond correctly to window resize events, and one-shot mode (-1) actually works. In addition, the name of the Varnish instance being watched is displayed in the upper right corner in curses mode.