Varnish and Moodle, to be blunt, hate each other. So much so that for my Moodle 1.9.x sites, I simply instruct Varnish to return(pass) without even trying to cache anything on a Moodle site. Today, however, I discovered even that is insufficient. Here’s what happened:
A user was reporting that when downloading large files from within Moodle (500mb course zip backups in this case), they’d stop at approximately 200mb. A look at varnishlog showed that Varnish was properly seeing that it’s a Moodle request that had a “Cache-Control: no-cache” header and didn’t even try to cache it before sending the request off to the backend. The backend was behaving exactly as expected and serving up the file. At some point, however, the download simply terminates before completion. No indications in the Varnish or Apache logs, nothing. It just … stops.
Huh.
So I put the following code in my VCL in vcl_recv:
if (req.url ~ "file.php") {
return (pipe);
}
Success!
Note: this must go into the VCL before the line in vcl_recv that checks the Cache-Control header, otherwise it’ll pass before it gets to the pipe:
if (req.url ~ "file.php") {
return (pipe);
}
# Force lookup if the request is a no-cache request from the client
if (req.http.Cache-Control ~ "no-cache") {
return (pass);
}
