Re: [squid-users] Squid to cache a DB?

On Friday 17 August 2001 09:55 am, Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> On 16 Aug, Scott Baker wrote:
> > I'm doing some work for a rather large website (www.livejournal.com)
> > and we're using a DB to store some image files. They're
> > stored as blob files, but will always have the same type URL
> > http://www.livejournal.com/userpic/3837
>
> Putting http-accelerator in front of the web-server (Apache has its own
> acceleration module, BTW) will speed it up, but will make the whole
> thing even uglier (and bulkier) -- even more resources will be needed by
> this machine. And why? So some lame admin can have it easier? It is
> mighty stupid to http-accel _static_ content...

That's really the whole point of an httpd accel -- caching static and
slowly changing files. It has almost no benefit for dynamic content.

Apache offers a lot of flexibility, but the one process per client model
has a huge per-client overhead. Even if all of his files were static,
apache alone would not scale very well. If making those images files
allowed him to replace apache with Tux or boa or something, you may have a
point, but that assume a lot about his situation.

The current design also allows him to easily add additional web servers,
whereas placing the images in a file system would require serving them
from a network file system (nfs, coda, etc).

The 3-tier design gives you a lot of expansion and flexibility options,
which is why most large web sites use it.

        -- Brian
Received on Fri Aug 17 2001 - 14:53:35 MDT