Case Study: Neue Zurcher Zeitung achieves 5x faster response times and backend protection with Varnish Software's Varnish Enterprise

NZZ uses Vanish Enterprise to ensure fast performance and content delivery

Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) is a Swiss media group known for high‑quality journalism that runs its platform in‑house. After replacing a slow PHP backend with a Node.js/NuxtJS stack, NZZ still needed robust caching to protect the backend and support high concurrency, and the introduction of Edge Side Includes (ESI) required changes to their VCL and caching strategy.

NZZ upgraded from open‑source Varnish Cache to Varnish Enterprise and adjusted VCL for ESI, a transition that was smooth and low‑effort. The result: reliably faster content delivery and backend relief—average response times with caching were about 5× faster (maximums roughly half those of uncached content), enabling more page impressions under load (including major traffic spikes); NZZ is now planning persistent memory storage to keep caches warm.

Neue Zurcher Zeitung

Claudio Kuenzler

Senior Systems Engineer