Nexcess, a Southfield, Michigan-based managed hosting company and provider of optimized Magento hosting, has announced the release of a major update to its Turpentine Magento extension, which further improves integration between Magento and the Varnish caching reverse proxy.
Turpentine, an open source Magento extension developed for use on Nexcess’ optimized Magento hosting platform, would enhance the performance of eCommerce stores by modifying Magento’s behavior to improve compatibility with Varnish, increasing the effectiveness of Varnish’s caching for the eCommerce application.
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator that sits between Magento and the Internet, caching data from the eCommerce store. Implementing Varnish caching for Magento would enable clients to significantly improve responsiveness and performance, but without Turpentine, Magento cannot take full advantage of Varnish’s caching capabilities, according to Nexcess.
Feature enhancements
The new release of Turpentine, version 0.6.0, makes the extension compatible with the most recent versions of Magento, including Magento Community Edition 1.8 and Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13. The update also includes numerous feature enhancements such as Magento Composer Installer support, lurker-friendly bans, and fixes for issues affecting ESI cache flushing and the caching of static assets.
“We’re proud of the significant progress we’ve made with Turpentine in the 18 months since its initial public release,” said Chris Wells, President and CEO of Nexcess, “Along with our optimized Secure Isolated Platform servers and Magento clusters, Turpentine contributes significantly to our ability to satisfy the stringent performance requirements of Magento users.”
Open source software
Turpentine is released under the GPLv2+ open source license and is freely available to developers and users. Nexcess’ extension modifies Magento behavior to enable full page caching, also for logged in visitors. The extension supports multiple Varnish instances for clustering, automatic cache clearing, and cache warming with a built-in site crawler. Turpentine can also generate and apply new Varnish configurations (VCLs) on the fly.
