[Jason Giedymin]

“Why logged in users can’t have cached pages? (This is what I am not able to understand)”

Because when you log in your given headers with cache control = “no-cache”.

We run a varnish head and cluster on top of another farm running nginx. Having said that we’ve changed our forum index to link the login page. Meaning users must navigate to that page to log-in. This allows us to cache the front page (for a short time) on varnish.

We manually force the cache on some pages (rejecting all cookies first).

Forum content gets updated frequently, and you don’t want to cache user logged in sessions or content that changes as speedily as forums. In this I completely agree with how automatic has done it and everyone else out there should take this model as a good base.

If you want cache your best non-destructive option is memcached server.