Accessing wwwcache.hensa using squid (fwd)

Anyone handling more than 3 million HTTP requests a day ? :-)

Martin

------- Forwarded Message

From: "M.L.Bowman" <mlb@sesame.hensa.ac.uk>
To: Jon Peatfield <J.S.Peatfield@damtp.cam.ac.uk>
Cc: wwwcache-users@mailbase.ac.uk,
Cc: jp107@damtp.cam.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Accessing wwwcache.hensa using squid
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 11:30:27 +0100

Jon,

> > installing squid on the machines instead of the netscape cache would be a
> > great step forward.
>
> Agreed! I understand that the NetScape cache was first installed as an
> experiment, isn't it time to try something else? In particular because Hensa
> are running the NS cache, lots of other people believe that they must do so as
> well (the doc doesn't exactly help here). While this is good for NS it isn't
> necessarily a good idea for the community.
> .
> At Networkshop, several people cornered Neil Smith and asked him about
> changing over to Harvest/Squid and he seemed to imply that Hensa was going to
> try them. Since then I've heard nothing about this.
>

In the past few months Squid was tried out on one of the cache
machines. During this period the performance was quite poor with
overheads in excess of 1 second on every connection being introduced
by the squid proxy. This compared to about 0.2 seconds on Netscape V2,
and exceeded our goal of less than 0.8 seconds per connection. Its
behaviour with certain elements of the HTTP protocol was also brought
into question by some users. Also, fatal bug fixes were coming out
quite regularly and the work-load was quite high.

As Neil Smith has recently left HENSA Unix for pastures new, he decided
it would be better to have all the cache machines running the same server
rather than three different ones (Netscape V1, Netscape V2 and Squid).
The Netscape v2 was stable enough to put on all the machines.

At the moment Netscape is coping well with the load put on it,
about 2.8 million requests per day. If you know of a Squid server
successfully handling this kind of load we would be interested to hear
about it.

from
Maggie Bowman
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Maggie Bowman
HENSA Administrator e-mail: archive-admin@unix.hensa.ac.uk
Computing Labs
University of Kent at Canterbury
Kent CT2 7NF phone: Kent 764000 ext 3769
U.K. e-mail: mlb@unix.hensa.ac.uk
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------- End of Forwarded Message
Received on Wed Oct 23 1996 - 04:05:57 MDT