http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/wiki/ArchitectNotes Just read above architecture notes of Vanish,-- a high performance http cache proxy which claims 10x faster than squid. To be short, it mentions following two points: (1) Manually manage memory swap nowadays is unnecessary and even detrimental to memory performance, since modern OS kernel already handles it very well. (2) Use per-thread data structure to avoid cache contention from multi- processor hardware. I agree with (2), but really doubt