By Massimo Mollica

Infrastructure Optimization Using Varnish Plus

CBC/Radio-Canada is Canada's national public broadcaster and one of its largest cultural institutions.

The Corporation is a leader in reaching Canadians on all new platforms and delivers a comprehensive range of radio, television, internet, and satellite-based services.

Deeply rooted in the regions (50+ regional & 17+ foreign bureaus), CBC/Radio-Canada is the only domestic broadcaster to offer diverse regional and cultural perspectives in English, French and eight Aboriginal languages.

ABOUT CBC/RADIO-CANADA

6 million Average Daily unique

visitors

WWW.CBC.CA

▪ Reduce origin footprint and cost ▪ Capital expenses and hardware refresh ▪ Operating (systems admin, power, maintenance)

▪ Reliability ▪ Varnish provides CBC with “uninterrupted service”

▪ Speed ▪ Backend Performance “Accelerator”

WHY USE VARNISH?

▪ Core Business: “Keep the content as fresh as possible”

▪ IT: “Keep the configuration as simple as possible”

▪ Finance: “Keep our costs as low as possible”

CONFLICTING REQUIREMENTS

▪ Keep caching rules simple ▪ Is the default “good enough”?

▪ Tune at the origin first rather than at the edge ▪ Reduces propagation time for TTLs during emergencies

▪ Understand and categorize content before tuning

OVERALL LESSONS LEARNED

▪ Fine tuning of object TTLs ▪ Default blanket site-TTL for all objects except HTML ▪ Use of Varnish, ability to adjust TTLs during special

events or emergency situations

▪ Leveraging “Varnish Cache Plus” ▪ Enhanced use of Cache Policies for the rest of

www.cbc.ca

HOW WE DID IT

HOW WE DID IT

▪ More content served from Varnish Cache ▪ Origin Offload went from mid 50% to mid 90% ▪ Origin Servers Bandwidth dropped by 40% ▪ Origin traffic normalized

▪ End-User experience improved ▪ Page Load Time and DOM interactive improved by >0.6s

▪ Before:9web+9Java+3Cache & After:3Web+3Java+2Cache

IMPACT

Servers Offload Impact

OUTAGE start time:6pm EST

OUTAGE ~7 TO 8 PM

OUTAGE 8:52PM

Questions?

Thank you!