Short introduction to hashing in Varnish

doc/sphinx/users-guide/hashing.rst

+
+Hashing
+-------
+
+Internally, when Varnish stores content in it's store it uses a hash
+key to find the object again. In the default setup this key is
+calculated based on the content of the *Host* header or the IP adress
+of the server and the URL.
+
+Behold the default vcl.::
+
+ sub vcl_hash {
+     hash_data(req.url);
+     if (req.http.host) {
+         hash_data(req.http.host);
+     } else {
+         hash_data(server.ip);
+     }
+     return (hash);
+ }
+
+As you can see it first chucks in req.url then req.http.host if it
+exsists. It is worth pointing out that Varnish doesn't lowercase the
+hostname or the URL before hashing it so in thery having Varnish.org/
+and varnish.org/ would result in different cache entries. Browers
+however, tend to lowercase hostnames.
+
+You can change what goes into the hash. This way you can make Varnish
+serve up different content to different clients based on arbitrary
+criteria.
+
+Let's say you want to serve pages in different languages to your users
+based on where their IP address is located. You would need some Vmod
+to get a country code and then put it into the hash. It might look
+like this.
+
+In vcl_recv::
+
+  set req.http.X-Country-Code = geoip.lookup(client.ip);
+
+And then add a vcl_hash:
+
+sub vcl_hash {
+  hash_data(req.http.X-Country-Code);
+}
+
+As the default VCL will take care of adding the host and URL to the
+hash we don't have to do anything else. Be careful calling
+return(hash) as this will abort the execution of the default VCL and
+thereby you can end up with a Varnish that will return data based on
+more or less random inputs.