I had created a post here regarding a Varnish plugin we wrote for cPanel over a weekend codeathon (http://www.unixy.net/varnish). Based on benchmarks, Varnish+Apache came out ahead of Litespeed. But benchmarks are not always conclusive since user traffic patterns are difficult to reproduce in a benchmark environments.

The feedback we've gotten so far on the plugin is very positive (google if interested). Nginx can do caching but not with the same flexibility as Varnish.

Regards

Um, but varnish is just a cache and so of course it's faster for static content? Or am I missing something?

Litespeed can work with php several times faster than apache+php while serving dynamic content (and so can nginx).

Varnish is good for caching any object; static or dynamic. The plugin we wrote uses Varnish to do a lot of dynamic page caching. Varnish is better at dynamic page caching than Nginx.

Litespeed has a caching mechanism too (introduced recently). But I think it requires an enterprise licesense of 2+ CPU. Here are some benchmarks of Apache+Varnish vs Litespeed: http://unixy.net/apache-vs-litespeed

Regards

Not this again...here are the reasons that benchmark sucked: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1593611

So would you use Varnish over Nginx as a reverse proxy to Apache?

What about an Nginx+FastCGI+PHP-FPM stack? - would you run Varnish in front of that?

The article is about full page caching. How's that different than static content?