Modal squid (online and offline modes) as test harness?

As part of a test harness for an application which pulls many web pages
in parallel, I'd like to use squid as a sort of record and playback
mechanism -- i.e.

    - Set squid to record mode
    - Run application which requests (via the caching proxy) various
documents
      During this phase, squid will be doing direct accesses.
    - Set squid to playback mode
    - Run application again (likely many instances of it, for stress
testing) relying solely on cached pages.

It seems clear both from the squid documentation, and the few sparse
queries about offline proxy mode in the archive of this mailing list
that squid doesn't do this out of the box.

My questions: How much work would it be to modify squid to be modal,
supporting both these modes (record and playback?). Is it possible to
play tricks with config files, and perhaps specify no direct access
(witout a parent), or inside_firewall to force playback mode? And what
about forcing documents to be cached regardless of being instructed not
to (it seems like a simple change to http.c), and forcing a long (or
infinite) expiration time for documents?

Disconnecting the squid host from the net isn't really an option, unless
it's possible to instruct squid to use a virtual interface for direct
accesses, and turn that interface off during playback mode.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated. I know there's an `offline mode'
patch for Apache, but I'd prefer to use squid if possible.

Thanks,
-C
Received on Tue Sep 09 1997 - 16:12:11 MDT