You can build a good squid box with lots of memory and fast hard drives and get good results. The squid setup is also nearly infinitely tunable, as opposed to the ones in Mikrotik and StarOS which have a pretty vanilla configuration. Being able to tune the cache parameters helps a lot, along with putting the cache directories on a separate hard drive and/or multiple ethernet cards to maximize the traffic flow. I have also used caching servers during heavy bandwidth demand or outage times to offload some of my browsing traffic to cable or dsl connections at the edges of the network.
From a deployment perspective, I have gotten the best results by letting any questionable customers bypass the caches. 95% of my customers are on 192.168.0.0/16 addresses, so we had a rule that directed the /16 network to the cache. Customers with public IP addresses do not go through the cache. That way, someone with a problem going through the cache would have to upgrade to a static IP so that they could bypass it. Relatively simple, and effective. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com Matt wrote: >> The people that we had the most problems with were web designers who's >> sites were cached and they couldn't easily see their changes. >> We always told then to add no cache to their sites. >> > > Thats an easy one to fix. Tell them to press [CTRL] F5. Thats all it > takes on virtually any standards compliant cache. The real pain is > when shopping carts or the like do not work. > > We have had far better success having Mikrotik redirect/DST-NAT too > Squid then using the Mikrotik cache. Far fewer websites with issues. > Running the cache on Mikrotik really shot the CPU load up on the > Mikrotik as well. Strange the CPU load on the box running Squid is > barely anything. > > In the process of upgrading our network and bandwidth. Gonna try the > Mikrotik cache again to see if its improved any. Its so much simpler > doing it with an inline Mikrotik box. > > Matt > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WISPA Wants You! Join today! > http://signup.wispa.org/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org > > Subscribe/Unsubscribe: > http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > > Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
