I have a network based on L4 intercept using two squid servers that are currently working quite well overall, but don't have a great deal of room to progress given their workload and squid's limitations to do with scalability and TPS.
The boxes: dual quad-core xeons @ 2.4Ghz 48GB memory 12 x 15,000 rpm 128GB drives dual gigabit ethernet At present, the machines are set up with a large number of kernel params tweaked and the squid process caches approximately 20GB of hot objects in memory along with about 19GB of drive cache (proc size of 27GB). Peak balanced load is in the neighbourhood of 1,000 requests per second between the two machines, which use HTCP to peer. I use virtually none of the content management features. Just caching. Given the HTTP 1.1 capabilities of ATS, the more efficient storage system and the higher scalability of the software, I'm considering moving to ATS to get around the painfully slow speed of squid development and the painfully bad HTTP 1.1 support along with lack of some features like range requests. I'm aware that ATS is not a 1:1 drop-in, however it appears to do what I need a cache to do: serve up content quickly, with low latency, and cache anything that could potentially speed up the response time of the web. So on to the questions: I do not see any documentation on using the tproxy capabilities of 2.1x, are they available for me to test my implementation? Are there any kernel params that traffic server likes vs. squid? This made a sizable difference in scalabilty in squid, FWIW. Can ATS make good use of so much RAM (is it 64-bit aware?) Obviously disk cache will not help since ATS uses raw devices in my desired implementation. Has anyone built a system with ATS to such high specs for a forwarding proxy? If anyone has, are there any tips for cache freshness & retention to share? Will there be a Debian package soon/ever? I'd prefer this just for testing purposes more than anything...! Are there any benchmarks done on given hardware between Squid and ATS with regards to content freshness, response times, scalability and overall throughput for forwarding proxy? If I find that ATS does what I need it to do, I'd like to step up and help somehow. Perhaps documentation, as I'm no coder. FYI. Thanks for the time, should anyone decide to help me out. -- --- Cheers, Steve
