# Site optimisation with varnish



## fred974 (Jan 17, 2017)

Hi,

I have many www/hiawatha webjail behind another www/hiawatha reverse proxy server.

All the backend webjail are setup with force https..

My question is about varnish...

Will instalingl a varnish proxy server to replace my hiawatha reverse proxy in view to increase the speed of the websites work?

I am asking as I have read that varnish does not support https...

Can I have varnish as frontend a get hiawatha to do ssl at the back end and still benifit for the speed that varnish can offer


----------



## SirDice (Jan 17, 2017)

fred974 said:


> Will instalingl a varnish proxy server to replace my hiawatha reverse proxy in view to increase the speed of the websites work?


No. Your backends are running SSL. So the proxy is nothing more than a pass-through. It can't "look" inside the requests (due to SSL) so it cannot cache anything.

What you should do is terminate the SSL on the proxy and pass normal  HTTP traffic to the backends. That will allow you to proxy to varnish and let varnish proxy to the backends.


```
>----SSL---->[proxy]-----http--->[varnish]---http---->[webserver1]
                                                  \---[webserver2]
```


----------



## fred974 (Feb 7, 2017)

SirDice 
If I understood corectly, I will set a jail for varnish and in the reverse proxy, instead to redirecting the traffic to the backend, I sent it to the varnish jail, which in turn redirect to correct wejail..
Is that correct?


----------



## SirDice (Feb 7, 2017)

Yes, that's correct.


----------

