This post is loaded epic fast from Varnish on FreeBSD
"A few years ago" we gave our money to Poul-Henning Kamp to make him "quit his day job" and code FreeBSD non-stop. Wow good times!
So what is this "Varnish" Poul-Henning Kamp coded for us? It's a web accelerator. Unbelievably decrease load time of your webpage. Before I started using it on my server, my girlfriends blog was loading for approximately 8 seconds but with Varnish it started to load in 1-2 seconds according to tools.pingdom.com. Read more in this PDF: Varnish_tech.pdf.
QUICK-START GUIDE
It's two in the morning and someone posted a link to your website on
slashdot. Don't panic, it takes only a minute to set up Varnish in
front of your web server:
1) Install Varnish - /usr/ports/www/varnish && make install
2) Reconfigure your web server(httpd.conf) to Listen 8080 (remember changing httpd-vhosts.conf if you use it)
3) echo 'varnishd_enable="YES"' >>/etc/rc.conf
4) /usr/local/etc/rc.d/varnishd start