High Performance Web Caching With Squid
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Squid is an excellent open source web caching proxy package, but it requires quite a lot of tuning to achieve the kind of performance seen in commercial proxies. This article presents several independently useful ideas for tuning a web caching system. If all of them are implemented, extremely high performance can be achieved from modest hardware. Further, this article will describe, for illustrative purposes, a web cache that I recently built for prototype purposes. This box was tested before and after tuning using the Polygraph web cache benchmarking suite and performance climbed from about 50 reqs/second to over 100 reqs/second. A very large difference for no extra hardware expense. This article assumes that you already know how to install and configure Squid, but would like to achieve faster response times and be able to handle much heavier loads with your web cache.
I feel obligated to warn you that this process is not for the faint of heart, there will be patching, compiling, configuring, and dragons on this journey. But this is one area where putting in a day or two of hard work can pay off very big. But, if after reading through this, you find yourself saying, "Huh?", you might want to consider purchasing one already built (
Swell Technology sells them) or pay a Linux nerd to build one for you using these instructions.
Next: Getting the Most From Your Hardware >>
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