It depends on your applications.
If the site doesn't offer any static files, and the dynamic content cannot
be cached, the proxy server won't offer very many improvements.
But even in that case, it can help, unless you are not serving only the
high-speed local intranet.
How it works:
The client makes the request to the proxy server. It makes the request
further to the back-end server. The back-end server response is sent to the
proxy, and the proxy sends it to the client.
Without a proxy server, your back-end server must keep a connection opened
with the client, until the download of the page finishes. If you have
clients that connect by a slow dial up modem, a process of your back-end
server will remain occupied just for sending data to the client, which is
not a very heavy job, but the back-end server will consume many resources
just for doing a simple thing.
If you have a proxy server, your back-end server sends the response to the
proxy and closes the connection, and it is free to serve other requests of
other clients.
Then the proxy server can send the response slowly, as the connection speed
of the client permits.
If you serve static files directly with your back-end server, even for
taking a file from the disk and sending it to the client, it will keep a
process on the back-end server occupied for a long time, while it could make
other processor intensive tasks instead.
If you are using a proxy server, you can configure it to server the static
files, without sending the request to the back-end server.
If your back-end server creates pages that could also be cached, than using
a proxy server has a big advantage, because that the pages are created only
once until their expiry date, and they are then served by the proxy server
directly, without bothering the back-end server with other requests.
Hope I have explained correctly, since I am using a proxy server only for a
few days.
Octavian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gregor Schneider" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <users@httpd.apache.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 4:04 PM
Subject: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Question regarding Squid / Apache
Hi guys,
I'm wondering if setting up Squid as a reverse proxy in front of our
hardware-load-balanced Apache/Tomcat-installations could boost up
performance.
After I did some reading about Squid, I understood:
- Squid is caching requests
- I can prevent Squid from caching dynamic content
- Squid is SSL-compliant
- we would not use Squid as a load-balance
- Squid is caching the outgoing data within the file-system
And that's the point:
Why should it be faster serving a request via Squid that also loads
the data from the file-system then serving it via Apache HTTPD, that
also reads the data from the file-system?
As I said, our application is SSL-based and protected via
mod_auth_cookie_mysql / securty-constraint within Tomcat, if that
helps to judge on a possible performance-optimization.
Looking forward to your comments!
Greg
--
what's puzzlin' you, is the nature of my game
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