DevShed: High Performance Web Caching With Squid

“Squid is an excellent open source web caching proxy package, but it requires quite a lot of tuning to achieve the kind of
performance seen in commercial proxies. This article presents several independently useful ideas for tuning a web caching
system. If all of them are implemented, extremely high performance can be achieved from modest hardware. Further, this article
will describe, for illustrative purposes, a web cache that I recently built for prototype purposes. This box was tested before and after
tuning using the Polygraph web cache benchmarking suite and performance climbed from about 50 reqs/second to over 100
reqs/second. A very large difference for no extra hardware expense. This article assumes that you already know how to install
and configure Squid, but would like to achieve faster response times and be able to handle much heavier loads with your web
cache….”
Squid is an excellent open source web caching proxy package, but it requires quite a lot of tuning to achieve the kind of
performance seen in commercial proxies. This article presents several independently useful ideas for tuning a web caching
system. If all of them are implemented, extremely high performance can be achieved from modest hardware. Further, this article
will describe, for illustrative purposes, a web cache that I recently built for prototype purposes. This box was tested before and after
tuning using the Polygraph web cache benchmarking suite and performance climbed from about 50 reqs/sec