Re: [RFC] modproxy:modperl ratios...

[Perrin Harkins]

On Thu, 27 Apr 2000, Matt Sergeant wrote:
> Is there any benefit of mod_proxy over a real proxy front end like "Oops"?

There's a big study of proxy servers posted at
http://bakeoff.ircache.net/N02/.  There are some expensive ones with
dedicated hardware that perform well.  Of course, there are tremendous
benefits to having the source when you discover that the way some header
is handled is not quite right for you, etc.  For example, we found we
wanted to disable the feature that gets a fresh page from the backend
server when the user hits reload, since the cached copy in mod_proxy is
the freshest that end users are allowed to see.

Basically, mod_proxy and squid have had more work put into making them
work as reverse proxies than other servers have.  It doesn't like Oops
supports a reverse proxy mode.  It may not be immediately obvious, but you
often need things like ProxyPassReverse
(http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_proxy.html#proxypassreverse) when you
start using a proxy server in this way.

- Perrin