allan juul wrote:
hi
i need advice before i waste too much time on the bleeding obvious.
we have a setup where we will reverse proxy content both to our own backend-servers (which run on IIS) and other external servers which content we dont control. one of the reasons we proxy is because of speed/performance
we have an Apache 2.054 up front on port 80 and the backend is on the same machine which is running windows 2004
we need to fix broken img src, and absolute links and that sort of thing coming from the external servers
i have fiddled with mod_proxy_html to rewrite stuff and that works ok, but have some features that doesn't mix well with our solution (content -type is encoded utf-8, where we proxy to iso-8859-1 for instance. or some html tags are stripped etc.) also caching becomes slower because of this output filter it seems (i guess because of unknown content-length)
But if you use a mod_perl filter you will still hit the issue of unknown content-length header.
yes, of course that's true. there goes caching (:
it seems way overkill to have a mod_perl enabled frontend, but i'm pretty confident we could write a mod_perl filter to do the content rewrites we need.
>
so, is a mod_perl-enabled Apache acting as a proxy just a sick idea. it will proxy content and the filter will have to scan all response content
It shouldn't be too hard to write a quick prototype, run benchmarks and see whether it scales or not. It's really hard to give an answer when you don't know what kind of type/size of code base you deal with, since if your code base is very small and you don't load tons of other things, you may get away with a quite efficient setup.
i'm not sure what you mean, but the backend code is compiled dll's and the usual images/js/css/xsl files all running in a .NET environment. it's not a gigantic code base but pretty big. the load on the servers are not so bad currently because its spread on several identical machine setups (load balanced). its a public web portal.
ok, i'll give it a mod_perl shot. i guess my main worries are just the memory the "light" frontend would begin to eat.
btw. (and OT): is it in fact correct that i should see the HTTP headers for the proxied server (IIS) and not the frontend (apache) ?
thanks ./allan
