Re: Your opinion on a http accelerator

William R Thomas wrote:

> looking for messages on using Squid as an accelerator
> I came upon a message from you. In that message you said
>
> "Squid is mainly a HTTP proxy server. The accelerator mode is a bonus,
> but I would not say that Squid is a very good or even fast HTTP server
> accelerator. "
>
> Do you have any suggestions on other accelerators, or has your opinion
> on this changed?

No on both questions.

There is not much point in having an accelerator in front of a normal
web server with static file contents. Todays web servers is quite a bit
faster than when the accelerator mode feature was added to Squid, and
there exists "hyperfast" web servers for handling static content which
are faster than any accelerator ever will be given the same horsepower.

If however the web server sends dynamically generated content then an
accelerator may be beneficial, especially so if this dynamically
generated content is cachable. But even if the dynamically generated
content isn't cachable the accelerator may help by taking most of the
workload for static objects.

Another useful way of using accelerators is as a kind of dynamic replica
servers. In that case the use makes sense as it effectively extends your
web server with the horse powers of the accelerator, and cuts down on
administration compared to have full-blown replica servers.

--
Henrik Nordstrom
Squid hacker