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  <div class="section" id="peculiarities">
<h1>Peculiarities<a class="headerlink" href="#peculiarities" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<p>There are a couple of things that are different with Varnish Cache, as
opposed to other programs. One thing you've already seen - VCL. In this section we provide a very quick tour of other peculiarities you need to know about to get the most out of Varnish.</p>
<div class="section" id="configuration">
<h2>Configuration<a class="headerlink" href="#configuration" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>The Varnish Configuration is written in VCL. When Varnish is ran this
configuration is transformed into C code and then fed into a C
compiler, loaded and executed.</p>
<p>So, as opposed to switching various
settings on or off, you write polices on how the incoming traffic should be
handled.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="varnishadm">
<h2>varnishadm<a class="headerlink" href="#varnishadm" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Varnish Cache has an admin console. You can connect it through the
<a class="reference internal" href="../reference/varnishadm.html#varnishadm-1"><em>varnishadm</em></a> command. In order to connect the user needs to be
able to read <cite>/etc/varnish/secret</cite> in order to authenticate.</p>
<p>Once you've started the console you can do quite a few operations on
Varnish, like stopping and starting the cache process, load VCL,
adjust the built in load balancer and invalidate cached content.</p>
<p>It has a built in command &quot;help&quot; which will give you some hints on
what it does.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="varnishlog">
<h2>varnishlog<a class="headerlink" href="#varnishlog" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Varnish does not log to disk. Instead it logs to a chunk of memory. It
is actually streaming the logs. At any time you'll be able to connect
to the stream and see what is going on. Varnish logs quite a bit of
information. You can have a look at the logstream with the command
<a class="reference internal" href="../reference/varnishlog.html#varnishlog-1"><em>varnishlog</em></a>.</p>
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  <h3><a href="../index.html">Table Of Contents</a></h3>
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<li><a class="reference internal" href="#">Peculiarities</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#configuration">Configuration</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#varnishadm">varnishadm</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#varnishlog">varnishlog</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
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