We have a cluster that we'd like to take some load off by way of using reverse proxies. Squid is what we'd generally use for this but I am wondering whether there is anything else out there that people are happy with?
Requirements:
Should sit behind a load balancer on N+1 boxes
Persistent backend connections
OK well you didn't specify that to start with. We use pound as an extra level of security between the firewall and DMZ based web servers. Allows us to sanity check the URLs that are passed to the back end servers and use a single IP address to distribute to several servers based on the hostname or URL. So I wouldn't say there's no point to it.
__________________
Andrew Taylor
Hey Presto! Internet Services www.heypresto.co.uk
__________________ Web Host - Certified Member
Last edited by heypresto : 27th November 2007 at 09:41 AM.
OK well you didn't specify that to start with. We use pound as an extra level of security between the firewall and DMZ based web servers. Allows us to sanity check the URLs that are passed to the back end servers and use a single IP address to distribute to several servers based on the hostname or URL. So I wouldn't say there's no point to it.
i didn't say there was no point to it... i said there was no point to it when you already had a pair of load balancers
Might want to take a look at nginx which seems to be trendy for reverse proxies these days. Not used it on a production system yet, but it looks pretty good from the testing I've done so far.
I've tried squid on a forum for 24 hours and had to take it off.
The problem I found was that the cache was causing the "who's online" stats to ignore just about everyone.
Providing you can figure a way of fixing little issues, then squid is the way to go.
I can see how that could happen... but we have written every single line of code that will run behind these things... so can set headers to manipulate caching to our heart's content... the load balancers can easily send requests direct to the web nodes as well based on path or regex, so they can be bypassed for dynamic pages in this way too.
I've used squid in the past on phpbb forums without problem - which forum was you accelerating with it where you had issues?
ChrisB.
__________________
Chris Burton 8086 Limited (Company No.: 06336617 VAT No.: 920 5102 75)
Ever wanted to know who uses a DNS or MX server ? with DNS History you can find out.
I can understand how the live web servers were not seeing the hits given that squid was returning pages from the cache but then I can't understand why or how squid could have returned index pages from the cache given that each logged in user would see a slightly different index page ie with their login name etc on it.
__________________
John Lyons www.domaincity.co.uk - £16.99 Hosting . www.netserve.co.uk - when quality counts.
** Company No 04191867 ** Vat GB771 6323 29 ** AS21448
I can understand how the live web servers were not seeing the hits given that squid was returning pages from the cache but then I can't understand why or how squid could have returned index pages from the cache given that each logged in user would see a slightly different index page ie with their login name etc on it.
Invision probably doesn't return proper HTTP headers on the pages... quite simple