Hidden Varnish Caches

[threegee]

Who is the network running these hidden varnish caches? This is 90% of the problem with the internet. These caches misbehave all the time yet nobody notices. Occasionally, like this morning, I actually get an error message bringing the hidden nature of these caches out of hiding.

Notice I am trying to access a gist of mine on Github

These caches also do NOT like anything that they have been told not to be cached. A simple 15mb JPEG file will take 1 minute + to load in a web browser most days yet I can grab the same file via wget on the command line in < 8 seconds. (I have screen recordings to prove this)

This is the constant status quo - constantly messing with people's browsing activity.

@AfriMan

 

[TheRoDent]

Who is the network running these hidden varnish caches? This is 90% of the problem with the internet.

Github themselves in this case. In order to do loadbalancing and cache frequently accessed content.

In this case, gist.githubusercontent.com resolves to github.map.fastly.net [151.101.0.133].

Fastly is a CDN provider that obviously provides services to github. They host their CDN servers locally and then proxy forward requests to the real backends at github.

In this case, either the github backend is actually down, or the local FASTLY CDN node doesn't have internet access to it. The IP 151.101.0.133 is a fastly owned IP address that is hosted at Teraco/NAPAfrica

 

[threegee]

Github themselves in this case. In order to do loadbalancing and cache frequently accessed content.

In this case, gist.githubusercontent.com resolves to github.map.fastly.net [151.101.0.133].

Fastly is a CDN provider that obviously provides services to github. They host their CDN servers locally and then proxy forward requests to the real backends at github.

In this case, either the github backend is actually down, or the local FASTLY CDN node doesn't have internet access to it. The IP 151.101.0.133 is a fastly owned IP address that is hosted at Teraco/NAPAfrica

Thanks, it was resolved shortly after this post.

Do you perhaps know of any hidden/undisclosed cacheing of all browsing traffic coming into SA by Telkom? I've had very strange things going on for months, not one ISP can ever answer as to why it happens.

I'll give you an example.

Opening an 18mb Jpeg in any browser often takes close on 2 minutes to download and display.
The very same jpeg grabbed via wget takes < 8 seconds?