this beat me.
could have left it and used the index.php?/ urls but I hate them.
worked fine like that but I really dislike those urls.

installed the cpanel nginx plugin and urls work as I want.
so we'll see.

testing the cpanel apachebooster as its hybrid varnish and cache and so far so good, been about 10 hours with no issues.
urls work as I want, need to tune a bit but the basic config seems stable
Exec. Time: 0.8077 Load: 0.01 Queries: 42 queries

its the site on your signature? i have only miss from cache

yeah but I am showing approx 80/20 miss/hit on varnish.
had approx 50/50 with just varnish so wondering if nginx making difference there.
have not tuned it yet as I just want to make it so it is stable first.
you may also be hitting cdn for stuff.
what are you using to examine?

curl -I http://url

need to test from linux vm here later to be sure but I think you're seeing the results of cdn handling a lot of it.

I am seeing hit and miss figures so some is cached by varnish, need to tune it though and need to see how this is interacting with nginx.
been more worried about making sure those other issues did not crop again, so far no issues.

dont you have a direct host or something to skip varnish?
yet i see the right headers:

curl -I http://www.site.com/forum/79-political-talk/

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server: ApacheBooster/1.3

Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2012 21:44:17 GMT

Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8

Connection: keep-alive

Vary: Accept-Encoding

X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.16

Set-Cookie: session_id=231bcfa883acdfc7eab9943f66853bcb; path=/; domain=.site.com; httponly

Set-Cookie: modtids=%2C; path=/; domain=.theconservativevoices.com

X-Cacheable: YES

X-Varnish: 1803809541

Via: 1.1 varnish

age: 0

X-Cache: MISS

seccond request also miss, third one took like 3 secconds to complete :|

on dedicated server running everything off that, maxcdn for images/stuff
3 seconds long but you may have also been hitting when I was changing some stuff over last few minutes.
going to disable cdn tonight to see what it looks like.

ok, post again if you want when you are done

will be a bit, really need to fire up vm here to run tests from here too.
just been too lazy LOL

seems to me varnish is doing very little in this setup, so while its stable its kind of a waste.
this was apachebooster plugin for cpanel.
going to try some other things.

why don you change for nginx and try with it plus varnish or nginx cache ?

got nginx plugin installed now to test reverse proxy to apache.
only been installed few minutes so not much done yet.
its not worth the trouble converting cpanel to pure nginx and I handle some dns/ftp for friends so cpanel is just a lot easier to use.

what i did was to leave al apache/panel/dns stuff listening on one ip and use another one for nginx/varnish