[squid-users] icap loadbalacing

Hi guys,

I am currently implementing a proxy solution with squid (3.1.4) as
caching/authentication proxy and a mcafee webwasher as content filter.
Besides some other issues, it seems to work. Unfortunately, we have
way too much traffic, only one squid and one webwasher cannot handle
that (we suppose, we don't have real performance values yet). That's
why we have to use a loadbalancer which will distribute (round robin
or whatever, we could even use DNS) the traffic to the squids. That's
not an issue either, the bigger problem is, that I can specify only
ONE icap server per squid, right?
So I only see two possibilities:
1) use the same count of squids and webwasher with a 1:1 mapping from
ONE squid to exactly ONE webwasher
2) use a loadbalancer in front of the webwashers and configure a VIP
address to which the squid will talk to

Number 1 is not really an option, because we are currently having more
webwashers than squids.
Number 2 is the preferred solution, but I am not sure if ICAP is
really loadbalanceable? The are a couple of problems we might run
into. The most important question, is it necessary that both request
(respmod and reqmod) will be sent to the same ICAP server? If not,
then everything should be ok with the loadbalancing. I am also not
sure about downloads which will be checked by the icap server.

Anyway, my final question, is ICAP loadbalanceable? Will there be
problems (either with downloading files, ...) if requests will be
submitted to different webwashers?

Thanks, best regards
John
Received on Fri Jun 25 2010 - 18:29:33 MDT