.. _users_performance:

Varnish and Website Performance
===============================

This section focuses on how to tune the performance of your Varnish server,
and how to tune the performance of your website using Varnish.

The section is split in three subsections. The first subsection deals with the various tools and
functions of Varnish that you should be aware of. The next subsection focuses
on the how to purge content out of your cache. Purging of content is
essential in a performance context because it allows you to extend the
*time-to-live* (TTL) of your cached objects. Having a long TTL allows
Varnish to keep the content in cache longer, meaning Varnish will make fewer requests to your relatively slower backend.

The final subsection deals with compression of web content. Varnish can
gzip content when fetching it from the backend and then deliver it
compressed. This will reduce the time it takes to download the content
thereby increasing the performance of your website.

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2

   increasing-your-hitrate
   purging
   compression
