Re: Seeking enterprise ideas for Squid

Hello All,

Some time back I had sent you an email seeking your feedback on some
specific issues. A lot of you came back with your comments. Thank you
all for taking the time, and also my apologies for taking this long to get
back on the forum.

To summarize, I had sought your feedback on the following items:

The appropriateness of discussing "proprietary" Cache server products.
================================================
Wrong choice of word. I really meant "commercial" systems, which play in
the same space as Squid. Without naming names, the reason why that is
interesting to us is quite simply this. Some of the details of other cache
products (e.g. performance) do become apparent to us from time to time,
either in customer situations or in our own informal benchmarking activity.
Occasionally, the difference between Squid performance and another product's
"stated" performance is stark. Now, it is really not possible to verify the
numbers for commercial products short of actually buying them and working
with them. We have conducted some "informal" Squid performance tests
ourselves (nothing worthy of sharing just yet), and we find enough of a
difference between the stated "commercial" numbers vis-a-vis our Squid
findings - enough to make us wonder where the next big performance gain is
to be had in Squid.

This was one reason we had looked at improving in-memory operations via the
RT Signal enhancement. There is some more work to be done on that front,
but the main point here is that the motivation for doing something like RT
Signal work actually came from the exposure to vendor and commercial product
discussions.

To close on this, the question is really not about discussing the specifics
of other products. Such a discussion may often be inappropriate. But it
should be possible to discuss performance (and functionality) ideas without
naming names. One may well have derived those ideas through exposure to
other products. Right?

Regarding an Enterprise version of Squid
===========================
Once again, I probably said something that detracted from the main issue.
It really is NOT about enterprise version vs. non-enterprise version of
Squid. This idea, not unrelated to the previous one about commercial web
cache server products, stems from an observation and hunch that our high-end
enterprise customers are generally not drawn to Squid. Is this a name
recognition issue, a general enterprise aversion to put "open source"
material in high-end production - all in all, a perception and brand
recognition problem?

Or is this real? From our informal measurements, and from the knowledge of
the types of concurrency and responsiveness desired by high end customers,
the issue may be real.

Of course, this begs the questions, "what is an enterprise?" and "how does
one define high-end". No doubt those need to be understood. Without
getting bogged down with such specifics, shall we just define then as
Fortune 2000 customers?

Specific performance analysis and enhancements for Network I/O, Disk I/O
===================================================
We understand completely that a lot of interface cleanup is happening as I
write this. But without subjecting anyone (Adrian and Robert in particular)
to any undue inquisition or pressure, we are just curious to know the impact
of, for instance, raw I/O on Squid response time at certain levels of
concurrent requests. Resources permitting, we may just try that. The goal
there will be nothing more than getting an initial idea, and we will
certainly share the findings, however informal, with the group. It is just
a matter of finding engineering resources.

Thanks again for all your responses. I would still like to understand why
enterprise customers tend not to consider Squid in their shortlists.

Regards
GV, ViSolve Engineering
Received on Wed Nov 13 2002 - 21:44:16 MST