Re: [squid-users] reverse proxy, how many origin servers?

On ons, 2008-07-30 at 10:57 -0700, Ben Drees wrote:

> We're using Squid 2.6 as a reverse proxy and load balancer. Does anyone
> out there have experience concerning the maximum number of origin
> servers Squid can load balance before problems start to arise? Are
> other limits likely to come into play that make this one moot?

It's a fairly high number, but the CPU usage slowly increases the more
cache_peers you have as Squid has to process more data to find the right
server to forward the request to. Until you reach some hundred or so
there shouldn't be much to worry about however.

For very very large setups with many hundreds of web servers it may be
better to use host based forwarding. Configure Squid with a private DNS
containing the actual IP addresses of the web servers hosting the sites,
and use the allow-direct http_port option to switch to "normal proxy
forwarding" mode even in reverse-proxy mode.. (no cache_peer lines
needed then, but you need to be careful about your http_access rules)

Regards
Henrik
Received on Fri Aug 01 2008 - 09:07:58 MDT