In this week’s episode of Two-Minute Tech Tuesday, we'll talk about Memory Governor. The Memory Governor is a Varnish Enterprise feature that is part of Massive Storage Engine. It limits the total footprint of the Varnish worker process while sizing the cache dynamically.

When you think of caching proxies and software for speeding up your website, you think about Varnish and Squid. But how do they compare? Which one is right for your web service?

Usually when we talk about the Massive Storage Engine (MSE), we’re talking about its main features and use cases. After all, storage is a kind of hidden, unsexy necessity that powers, in part, many of the conveniences we take for granted: ubiquitous on-demand streaming services, for example. The instant-delivery accessibility of these content libraries is not magic even if it sometimes seems like it. And our MSE discussion normally revolves around the efficiency and speed enabled by a smart storage and caching setup designed for high-performance video distribution, CDNs, and large-cache use cases.

As consumers, we expect to access any content we want on any device with within-millisecond-availability, playing on-demand. We don’t usually think about what is required technically to make this work. One of the biggest components in this equation is storage and the process of accessing selected content from storage to serve it. With massive libraries of both in-demand and long-tail content available, the challenges of high-performance, fast, available and consistent delivery are growing.