[squid-users] An option to force keepalives for POST during forward proxy

I have a situation where being able to use keepalives for POST methods
would be very handy. Essentially, I have a series of .NET webservers
that POST data to a linux-based webservice. The .NET webservers and the
the linux servers are geographically distributed, so we have a 65ms
latency between them. The average POST body size is 40-50KB.

Our goal is to significantly reduce the time it takes to make these
POSTs. We have tried using TCP Window scaling and keepalives on the
.NET servers, however the .NET framework appears to have many bugs in
this regard and is not reliable. We have decided that our best course
of action is to have the .NET servers talk to the webservice through a
small cluster of squid proxies. This way, we can use Linux's reliable
TCP Window scaling. Unfortunately, squid doesn't keep persistent
connections on the backend for POSTs.

I read a message from the list a while back that this was done on
purpose because using POSTs with keepalives is not well defined. I
believe there should be an option to allow this sort of behavior and
would like to investigate implementing it myself if there are no other
plans to do it. My webservice is running behind Apache, and it seems to
properly handle POSTs with keepalive.

Can anyone point me in a general direction to get started on this? I am
  not familiar with the squid codebase. Also, does anyone know how much
work it might be to implement this?

Thanks,
Mike
Received on Sat Mar 21 2009 - 00:49:48 MDT