Antti, the VCL should still work, but check the other comments for links to other updated and better VCLs.

As handy and well built plugin the W3TC is, I just have this feeling that I’m shooting a fly with a cannon when dealing with W3TC, especially if I have Varnish already installed and other cache and page speed things handled.

But you’re right, purging sure is mandatory and on top of that W3TC has HTML minification, which would have to be separate plugins otherwise.

Btw, is your .vcl file still valid to be used with W3TC?

W3TC can also control cache/non-cache per user level. e.g. no cache for logged-in users, no cache for Contributors, Editors, etc.

W3TC has the ability to purge a page from Varnish cache when a post is updated. For instance, if you want users to see latest update or latest comments on a post, this is impossible unless you notify Varnish to expire a cached page/post. You might also want your home page to show the latest posts, as soon as they are posted… again, this is not possible with timed expires… this requires a mechanism to purge the existing page from Varnish cache; W3TC automates this process.

And if I set far expiring headers in my Nginx conf, and minify CSS and JS in my build process, and sources with WP Minify, and I don’t use CDN. Then, it’s a bit hard to see the point, or am I missing out on something?

However, I have recently set up an AWS server farm with separate Apache and MySQL EC2 instances… so it’s time to set up some Elastic Load Balancer Varnish servers out in front of Apache for the high-traffic sites.

More info coming soon, hopefully before the end of March.

I recently took a full time job, and haven’t continued working with this VCL.