} > Also, is anyone interested in setting up a caching httpd server on ftoomsh?
} > If you are, send me some mail and I'll send you the info I have. Once it's
} > installed it's pretty easy to use; you just set your proxy http server
} > environment variable and all http requests go via the cache.
} > Some people report getting 50% hit rates for their caching servers.
}
} A good idea. Is the caching process resource hungry, though?
No, not really. The setup I manage here serves about ten-fifteen
people who use the Web pretty much constantly, over a wide and varied
range of sites and protocol types. I've set it up with a 40 Mb cache,
which (although it can get filled -- rarely) commonly hovers around
the 50% full mark.
As far as CPU resources go, a running CERN httpd doesn't consume
very much in the way of resources at all. The load on the
machine goes up a little if it's caching as well, but not by much. Just
don't start the server via inetd if you're running caching as well, or
have an frequent but intermittent use pattern -- you then run into
gobs of startup overhead for each invocation of the server.
The server is also very configurable as far as caching goes. You can
choose the protocols to cache, and for how long (on average) to cache
each. You can set upper and lower bounds for likely cached file sizes,
and so on. It's groovi, really.
-- Colin.