According to Jim Winstead:
> On Apr 21, Michael hall wrote:
> > I'm on the new-httpd list (as a lurker, not a developer :-). Any ideas,
> > patches, help porting, etc. would be more than welcome on the list.
> > Mod-Proxy is actually kind of in limbo, there are some in favor of
> > dropping it and others who want it. I guess the code is difficult and
> > not easy to maintain and thats why some would just as soon see it go
> > unless someone steps up to maintain (redesign) it. There are some
> > working on it and apparently it will survive in some form or another.
> > Now would be a perfect time for anybody to get involved in it.
>
> mod_backhand may also be the solution people are after.
>
> http://www.backhand.org/
Is anyone using this in production? It has the disadvantage
of requiring itself to be compiled into both the front and
back ends. I have some backend data being generated by
custom programs running on NT boxes and would like to have
a fail-over mechanism. We may end up running Windows load
balancing on them, but that means paying for Advanced Server
(about $3k extra) on each of them when a smart proxy would
work just as well.
I also didn't see how to access it through mod_rewrite which
is how I control most of my proxy access. This might be
possible by letting backhand handle certain directories and
RewriteRules to map to those directories - I just didn't get
that far yet.
> (Sorry for the off-topic-ness.)
>
> I'm also coming around to the idea that caching proxies have some
> very interesting applications in a web-publishing framework outside
> of caching whole pages. All sorts of areas to exploit mod_perl in
> that sort of framework.
This can help with the load on a backend, but after watching squid
logs for a while I decided that a lot of extra traffic is passed
through when users hit the 'refresh' button which will send the
'Pragma: no-cache' header with the request. For things like
images you may be better off using RewriteRules on the front
end to short-circuit the request, and other popular pages that
should update only at certain intervals can be done with
cron jobs and delivered from the front end as well. So, from
a mod_perl perspective I don't care much about the caching side
but really need the relationship between mod_rewrite and
mod_proxy. I haven't found equivalent built-in functionality in any
other server.
Les Mikesell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
