Re: Ideas/solutions to caching identical objects ...

At 00:54 03/12/96 -0500, carson@lehman.com wrote:
>You could implement this as an external process that converted identical
>files to hard links. Unfortunately, this only works if everything is on the
>same partition. Anything else would require fairly major modifications to
>squid's internals...

I thought about that myself, and came to the same conclusion. One other
possibility is using soft links. However due to the problems with making
sure you don't delete the original, when something points to it, that would
require changing squid's code.

But it has just occurred to me, that maybe what could be done, with no mods
to squid, is that a separate prog, when finding one of these files, copies
it into a place specifically for shared files. It then makes a soft link
from _both_ the files to the correct place. (Or maybe try a hard link, and
then only if that fails do a soft link - similarly with the copying stage).

Then the only problem is cleaning up orphans. Since there are likely to be
few files like this (even though they tend to be large!), then this can just
be done in a separate job once a night or something.

But this is all definitely for those who really want to get the optimum
amount of caching out of their cache.

Jonathan L.
Origin UK, 323 Cambridge Science Park,Cambridge,England. Tel: +44 (1223) 423355
--------[ Do not think that every sad-eyed woman has loved and lost... ]-------
------------------------[ she may have got him. -Anon ]------------------------
Help fight spam! http://www.vix.com/spam/ These opinions are all my own fault.
Received on Tue Dec 03 1996 - 10:15:14 MST