[nycbug-talk] Serving High Performance Web Sites --- UNIGROUP Meeting 22-MAY-2008 (Thu):

[Steven Kreuzer]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 03:39:47PM -0400, forest mars wrote:
> On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 4:49 PM, George Georgalis <george at galis.org> wrote:
> 
> > well one approach is to use squid as a reverse proxy.
> > problem with a lot of (all) alternate webservers is
> > they are not apache, so various modules and howtos just
> > don't apply to alternate. Using a reverse proxy lets
> > the proxy serve pages that don't require apache while
> > querying your *unchanged* apache should a request come
> > for dynamic or expired content. Squid is designed for
> > speed.
> >
> 
> 
> That's one approach for sure, though it seems like it's rate of adoption has
> dropped off, possibly bc it's seems easier to do just about anything aster
> with lighttpd. I don't know offhand any corner cases of something you
> *can't* do faster with light-y, though there may very well be some.
> 
> So aside from squid adding an extra point of failure, and whether or not
> squid is designed for speed, what about the added latency to parse & proxy
> each request? Not to mention the additional hardware requirements that don't
> actually give you any real increase in capacity, even after throwing
> additional cpu cycles to compensate for the performance hit. I'm just
> saying...

I might be derailing slightly but....

If you are going to throw a reverse-proxy HTTP accelerator in front of your
web servers, you're better off using varnish[1] instead of squid. This blog
entry[2] does a really good job at explaining everything that is wrong with
squid and varnish's architecture notes[3] also go into great detail as well.

A while back while I was experimenting with squid on FreeBSD I wrote down
some notes[4] on how to get the most bang for your buck. You might find them
handy if you are using squid.

[1] http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/
[2] http://seankelly.tv/blog/blogentry.2007-03-02.4768602564
[3] http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/wiki/ArchitectNotes
[4] http://exit2shell.com/~skreuzer/squid.txt

--
Steven Kreuzer
http://www.exit2shell.com/~skreuzer