Economy Size Geek

I was doing some research on caching reverse proxies - related to some REST stuff. I figured I’d end up at Squid - since it seems like the standard for this sort of thing. Then I hit an article that got me to

Vanish:

Varnish was written from the ground up to be a high performance caching reverse proxy. Squid is a forward proxy that can be configured as a reverse proxy. Besides - Squid is rather old and designed like computer programs where supposed to be designed in 1980. Please see ArchitectNotes for details.

I have no idea how well it works but two things: The first was funny - the second interesting

From the FAQ:

Does Varnish require the system to have a C compiler? ¶

Yes. The VCL compiler generates C source as output, and uses the systems C-compiler to compile that into a shared library. If there is no C compiler, Varnish will not work.

.. Isn’t that security problem? ¶

The days when you could prevent people from running non-approved programs by removing the C compiler from your system ended roughly with the VAX 11/780 computer.

The second was a discussion about how Squid’s basic architecture is simply wrong for the problem it is trying to solve.

Take Squid for instance, a 1975 program if I ever saw one: You tell it how much RAM it can use and how much disk it can use. It will then spend inordinate amounts of time keeping track of what HTTP objects are in RAM and which are on disk and it will move them forth and back depending on traffic patterns.

Well, today computers really only have one kind of storage, and it is usually some sort of disk, the operating system and the virtual memory management hardware has converted the RAM to a cache for the disk storage.

So what happens with squids elaborate memory management is that it gets into fights with the kernels elaborate memory management, and like any civil war, that never gets anything done.

When I have more time looks like something i’m going to have to try out…