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Old 26th November 2007   #1 (permalink)
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Reverse Proxies

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
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Old 26th November 2007   #2 (permalink)
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Old 26th November 2007   #3 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by heypresto View Post
Pound is not a Web accelerator: no caching is done - every request is passed "as is" to a back-end server.

Whats the point in a reverse proxy that doesn't cache when you already have dedicated LBs

Add to the requirements;

MUST CACHE DATA as per HTTP Header controls
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Old 27th November 2007   #4 (permalink)
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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.
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Last edited by heypresto : 27th November 2007 at 09:41 AM.
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Old 27th November 2007   #5 (permalink)
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We've played with varnish, not too bad dunno if it'll do what you want though
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Old 27th November 2007   #6 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by heypresto View Post
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
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Old 27th November 2007   #7 (permalink)
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looks like we're sticking with Squid with a persistency patch
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Old 27th November 2007   #8 (permalink)
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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.
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Old 27th November 2007   #9 (permalink)
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The servers behind it are actually running nginx, and there is a cluster behind that of FastCGI servers (PHP in FastCGI mode).

AFAIK though, nginx does not cache either...
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Old 27th November 2007   #10 (permalink)
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ZXTM would fit the bill, but it's not cheap - you could pay for quite a bit of custom work to be done on Squid for the price of a pair of ZXTM boxes.
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Old 27th November 2007   #11 (permalink)
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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.
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Old 28th November 2007   #12 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by netserve View Post
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.
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Old 28th November 2007   #13 (permalink)
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I've used squid in the past on phpbb forums without problem - which forum was you accelerating with it where you had issues?

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Old 28th November 2007   #14 (permalink)
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Invision.

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.
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Old 28th November 2007   #15 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by netserve View Post
Invision.

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
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