Over time, the most popular content we’ve created relates to hands-on Varnish use and relevant dos and don’ts. Naturally, we continue to create more content about this because our raison d’être is to help Varnish users get the maximum performance and efficiency they can from their Varnish setups.

Let’s get down to business.

VCL is awesome, but it's also a bit frightening to newcomers, and most of the time, people are more interested in something that "just works"™ than "doing the right thing"™ and they google their way out of it.

Problem is that the first thing that sort of works isn't necessarily the right thing, and the proliferation of one particular code snippet is what prompted the writing of this post. The snippet in question? This guy:

sub vcl_deliver {
    if (obj.hits > 0) {
        set resp.http.X-Cache = "HIT";
    } else {
        set resp.http.X-Cache = "MISS";
    }
}

Recognize it? Have it somewhere in your code, maybe? If so, read on, and let's try to do the right thing, and hopefully, get a better setup thanks to it. Don't worry, this is a short one, so hop in.

As you may know, part of my job consists of helping Varnish users, both customers and community users (join us on IRC!), often looking at their VCL and see if there's anything wrong. And sometimes, there is. After all, VCL is a programming language and mistakes happen. However, one point stands out as being badly understood, and I feel it deserves a short blog post to set the record straight.