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When a page is cached in varnish, internally does it store the page on disk or memory?

What if a single server cannot store all the cached pages, does it have clustering or do you then choose which varnish server to cache? i.e. it is done at the application level?

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by default it stores it on disk but lets the OS decide to keep it in memory or not. There is also the malloc option which says always store in RAM and persist option which means keep the cache on disk and save even on a restart

https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/3.0/reference/varnishd.html#storage-types

There is no clustering but you can specify how big you want your cache to be.

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so how would a site like facebook use varnish when there is no clustering? i.e. it all can't fit on a single server. i guess something like haproxy is used to hash the request and send it to the correct varnish box? – codecompleting Jul 19 '11 at 14:53
so you what if your cache can't fit on a single server? how do you shard, based on? – codecompleting Nov 22 '11 at 15:04
facebook isn't 1 giant app.. it is many apps all making up a big one. So all requests are going through many caching layers. I know they use varnish.. just not sure to what extent. – Mike Nov 23 '11 at 3:19
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