Does softupdate help squid ?

[Christopher Sean Hilton]

On Mar 17, 2008, at 4:51 AM, Frank Bonnet wrote:

> Hello
>
> I'm setting up a squid cache (3.0.2) machine FreeBSD 7.0 based and I  
> wonder
> if softupdates could help (make it faster ) or not the cache  
> partition ?
>

I can't imagine that it would hurt. Last I looked though squid may not  
be the best tool for this job. Poul Henning-Kamp has written an http  
accelerator called varnish.

I'll start by saying that implementing varnish is on list of things to  
do so my experience is purely anecdotal. No that I've said that, the  
feature that grabbed my attention was the fact that it's written to  
modern unix. If I understand what I read correctly this means that  
varnish eschews squids separation of the cache into  a fast cache in  
memory and a slow cache on disk. Instead varnish uses a big memory  
mapped file allowing the operating system to manage which cache  
objects are in memory and which ones are on disk. On FreeBSD at least  
that would seem to me to be a bigger performance win than softupdates.

-- Chris