Notes from the Architect (2006)

The kernel tries to find a free page, if there are none, it will take a little used page from somewhere, likely another little used squid object, write it to the paging poll space on the disk (the “swap area”) when that write completes, it will read from another place in the paging pool the data it “paged out” into the now unused RAM page, fix up the paging tables, and retry the instruction which failed. When Varnish next time refers to the virtual memory, the operating system will find a RAM page, possibly freeing one, and read the contents in from the backing file. The HTTP objects are not needed as filesystem objects, so there is no point in wasting time in the filesystem name space (directories, filenames and all that) for each object, all we need to have in Varnish is a pointer into virtual memory and a length, the kernel does the rest.

Source: varnish-cache.org