How to safely purge in Varnish if backend is sick without losing content
- by Highway of Life
If the backend is sick, what is the preferable way to ensure that stale content can be retrieved from the backend when a PURGE request is made?
When a PURGE request is made, whether or not the backend is sick, by default the content will be eliminated from the Varnish cache and if the backend is down, a 503 page would be served to the user until the backend comes back online to serve a new version of the content. I'd like to be able to at least serve up a stale version of the content if a new version could not be retrieved from the backend.
Is this possible without installing the Softpurge Varnish Mod?