Hello again,
I know I don’t write much, but that’s just my lack of time. But hey, I’m trying. Anyway, today I wanna tell you about setting up a squid server for a high-load environment (hey, just like the title suggests ) First, a little background.

Squid a caching proxy server which can be configured to work in different environments. It can be a forwarding proxy, an internet transparent gateway for access control purposes and my favorite - a reverse proxy, i.e. website accelerator.

I won’t tell you much regarding the first two(serving the same purpose, really), as I never really had to deal with those kind of environments. And even if I’d decide to, AFAIK there is a problem working in a multi-WAN configuration, which is exactly what I need. But I did study a lot regarding the third option - a website accelerator.

Not to say that I’ve found the perfect configuration, but for our purposes it seems pretty decent. A very big problem with squid is that it has very few guides on the net. It does have a configuration guide on its website and some FAQ and other stuff, but I guess what is really needed is some examples of a known configuration working in a high-load environment. Surprisingly, a lot of people asking about this kind of things, use very weak hardware, like PIII servers and such. And while I understand that it serves their needs pretty well, that doesn’t help me to understand the real abilities and limitations of this software. What is even less helping is that the developers themselves don’t know those things - not to blame them in any way, because, as they say, every setup is pretty unique and there’s no real way to know this without trying out different options.
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