[falcolas]

Without discussing any of the political points (which felt out of place), this simply means that we will continue to not use Varnish.

Nginx' caching is good enough that it's not worth the pain of trying to implement some wacky setup just to use Varnish.

[eosrei]

It's straightforward to run Pound or HAProxy in front of Varnish to provide SSL-terminatation. I wouldn't consider it a wacky setup. The performance gains over Nginx for static/anonymous caching is significant.

[falcolas]

It adds two more layers of software to configure, monitor and maintain, and my own tests disagree on the performance gains for a fairly typical Wordpress install.

The response times were virtually identical, and the load on the box was significantly lower with Nginx over varnish, so the simplicity was the deciding factor.

[phkamp]

If you don't need varnish, it would be pretty stupid to start running it...

[falcolas]

Varnish has a few bonus features (like caching the gzipped version of responses), which could still make it a useful addition.

We've settled on Nginx for a few of our use cases (to good reception), but there are other use cases we're still evaluating.