A few lessons on this arena:
1) Move your pictures to another server *even if you're using a proxy*
Search back in the archives for my previous post on this topic.
2) If you use mod_proxy you can give it the same web root and have it serve
some static objects itself instead of having to cache them. But 1) is even
better than doing this. Sometimes you might not have a choice, such as with
java applets.
3) mod_proxy is poorly designed and poorly implemented. The main deficiency is
that each process is responsible for opening and maintaining its connection
to the backend. This defeats keep-alives completely and forces a lot of
overhead in the kernel and the servers.
There's a much better design that involves creating a fixed number of
sockets and treating that as a shared pool. In that design the backend can
have a long keep-alive timeout and maintain persistent connections to the
front-end.
Despite these concerns I've been using mod_proxy myself and it does work. I'm
planning to change to mod_backhand though which implements 3) but it's new
code.
--
greg
