Today we're releasing a new open source project called "Thinner." It's for websites, like ours, that use the open source caching engine Varnish.
It's written in Ruby, and provides a command-line utility that lets a site administrator slowly purge the Varnish cache on a site that needs to be updated right away, but is under so much load that it can't be safely purged all at once for fear of melting down the underlying web server.
More details are in the Github docs.
Consider this our (kinda late) gift to our fellow news nerds who are spending election night nervously watching the load averages on their servers.
