You're doing something horribly wrong. I work for a live streaming company and we make extensive use of Varnish. It can probably solve the problem you're describing.
I'm not doing a damn thing wrong other than using Cloudfront. The problem is on their end, not mine. Thinking Varnish could solve this problem is utterly confused. Do you know what CDN does? CDNs have servers located around the world so files are loaded quickly and with low latency.
Furthermore, your profile suggest you work for a pump and dump penny stock company (basically a scam). If your employer is paying you in something other than cash, you need to walk away asap.
Sounds like troll bait, recall the recent article about PG's modding algorithms. Life's too short.
There's lots of video CDN "solutions", and it's almost always cheapest (even after labor support) to DIY with bare metal at very large scale. If it were me, I would eval video CDN shops using tsung test cases wired up as nagios checks. Gotta make sure their stuff stays working.
A payment gateway once mistakenly deployed API changes to production without notice. Trust no one.
and it's almost always cheapest (even after labor support) to DIY with bare metal at very large scale
If you simply need to deliver files or live streams, without needing to provide complex functionality at the edge (various kinds of protection, geo blocking, or pay-per-minute), and your traffic patterns are predictable - it's often cheaper to build your own solution. Once you start thinking about backbone and colo redundancy, deploy in different countries with contract commits - things get expensive very quickly.
The beauty of using a massive third party delivery service isn't performance, it's elasticity. Just like with the web apps (frequently hosted on DIY systems) that go down as soon as the link goes up on HN - being able to absorb traffic spikes without failing (and without forcing you to commit to a higher tier for a year) can be very valuable.
I'm entirely aware of the financial situation. How is calling my employer a pump and dump scam NOT spiteful when I've worked on this project from the beginning?
Edit: Also, I don't appreciate you posting that. It's completely off-topic. Keep it classy.
At this point, the article has left hackernews. I am writing to you as fellow hacker looking to help you out.
You are involved in a stock fraud. The company you work for is a sham.
If you live in the US, then you have a plausible defense that you have no understanding of the underlying business. In this case, you likely can't afford the lawyer to present this case.
If you don't live in the US, then be careful. Imagine, ten years down the road, you are a successful engineer, and want to take your family to Disney world. Unfortunately, there is an outstanding bench warrant for your arrest, and rather than a nice family vacation that your wife wanted, you end up in a US prison.
Have you (or anyone else) had a chance to A/B test caches? That is, setup network API requests to be duplicated/filtered from production and sent to test environment(s).. credit to netflix.
Setup enough identical boxes with each of Squid, Nginx, Varnish, trafficserver, etc. and evaluate each with basically the same traffic and however much tweaking.
Let's keep in mind that individual box performance will not directly translate into your cluster performance or global network performance. A box can be fine-tuned to serve a file at lightning speed, but once you connect a bunch of them together, and start delivering lots of different files to millions of people - different factors come into play. Distributing files, replacing files when updated, content churn, etc etc
Simple caching works for images, but doesn't work for large video files, for example (look at latest financials from public CDNs - they are all bleeding cash).
It's really not that simple as testing a box to see which setup works best.
