Re: Features

On Mon, 24 Nov 1997, Dancer wrote:

> > Compressed intercache compressions. I've made a lame hack of this for my
> > home squid: I use ssh to setup a non-encrypted compressed pipe and use
> > cache_host_acl to direct .html,.txt,.htm files through it.. This speeds of
> > page loads GREATLY! This was one of the features I was working on when I
> > was working on the cache for the Mnemonic browser. Both the gzip style and
> > LZO type compression methods would work well here.. (Esp now with
> > persistant connections, as the compressor will no longer get the 'hit' at
> > the start)
>
> (Dancer's jaw drops). Why the hell didn't _I_ think of doing that??
> Damnit...I've got four squid's in dire need! Can I swipe a look at your setup?
>

I've been thinking about compression and caches a bit lately.

Compression can have two useful effects;

1) reduce the storage space of the object in the cache.
2) reduce the bandwidth of inter-cache transfers.

A compressed file system gives you 1) but doesn't give you the benefit of
reduced memory usage that truely compressed objects would. Using ssh as
above gives you 2) but with a CPU hit. Using both gives you both but
wastes CPU in a major way (fs has to decompress object off disk, ssh has
to re-compress it to send it, remote ssh decompresses it, remote fs has to
re-compress it to disk).

If squid could be hacked to store and forward compressed objects, you
would get both benefits with reduced CPU overhead. Just an idea...

ABO
Received on Sun Nov 23 1997 - 22:47:07 MST