Re: apache style squid?

Oskar Pearson <oskar@is.co.za> writes:
> Hi
>
> > Has anyone given any thought to building an apache style squid?
> Yes, but then it wouldn't be squid... The whole idea was to have
> a single process (avoids context-switching) that's portable
> (doesn't use threads and other fancy tricks) and doesn't fork (avoids the
> extra overhead).
>
> Apache has a cache-module... perhaps it's worth spending time on,
> rather than re-writing large amounts of squid?

That's an interesting thought. I'll take a look at that. Wonder how it
handles the cache index.
 
> I think that with the advances in OS's lately, a lot of the
> above problems/inefficiencies are irrelevant... or they may not be...
> Some OS's still have a NASTY context switch time AFAIK...

Well, compare the context switch time to calling select() on 3000 file
descriptors. :)

> I know that Dave Miller (one of the linux gurus) was very impressed with
> the things squid does to try and optimise it's throughput. If you
> compare something like the Zeus web server (http://www.zeus.co.uk/) with
> apache there is a major speed difference... (300% supposedly).
> Zeus is a single process which (from what I can see from the binary)
> forks off as many processes as there are CPU's and then hands off
> requests to these single, monolithic programs... if there is only one
> CPU (and thus one process) and it starts running short on FD's, it seems
> to fork off a seperate process to handle those requests.

That's something close to the combined threads/process model someone
else mentioned that looks like it would be a pretty neat idea.

Michael.
Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 13:15:43 MDT