The Varnish Roadshow is a performance focused presentation on Varnish, an open source HTTP accelerator. It discusses how Varnish was created to address the shortcomings of traditional caching solutions like Squid that do not take advantage of modern computing architectures. Varnish uses a custom configuration language called VCL, has a split manager/worker process design for high performance, and provides real-time statistics and management via shared memory and command line tools.