Varnish author here.<p>I&#x27;m several sets of information short of being able to say anything particularly precise about their results.<p>Their diagnosis is very detailed and useful, but I think the main thing we can learn from it is that the Linux kernels VM system is horrible when memory is overcommitted.  At least to me that&#x27;s not news.<p>I will also say that we in the Varnish project have not worked much on performance the last couple of years, because people have asked much more for features than performance.<p>Some of the stuff we have done have traded CPU cycles for flexibility, but if the Varnish users change their mind and decide performance needs a boost, we can do that too.<p>The reason we dropped sendfile(2) in Varnish was that nobody seemed to be able to show any credible performance improvement, and dropping it allowed us to implement on-the-fly processing of the HTTP bodies in a cleaner way.<p>We can certainly bring sendfile(2) back for &quot;the straight&quot; path if that&#x27;s important to people.<p>The &quot;file&quot; storage was our first rather primitive storage engine and it has never been optimized to any extent.  Varnish Software Inc. has a commercial offering that includes a &quot;massive storage engine&quot;, but most people seem to just use the &#x27;malloc&#x27; storage.<p>And no, Varnish is not dying just because BBC doesn&#x27;t use it in the absolute far corner of high-end usage doesn&#x27;t use it:  If NGINX is the better tool for them, they should absolutely be running NGNIX.