Re: [squid-users] Is squid-cache the right tool?

Sam Carleton wrote:
> I have been using squid-cache at home on my firewall for years now, I
> use it for the normal standard old stuff of simply caching of where we
> surf.
>
> I am writing a new kiosk based software package that has a GUI app as
> the front end for the operator and apache is serving up the pages to
> the web browser clients. What is being served up are images. The
> images that come into the GUI app are full size images, 4 megapixel on
> up.
>
> Current what I am doing is after my software copies the full size
> images into the computer, it then creates the two different web
> images, one is a small thumbnail (120x180) the other is a larger image
> for the screen (400x600). When one is doing this to 200 images at one
> time, it takes a while, too long in my opinion.
>
> My first though was to have the indexing page detect if the smaller
> images where there and create them, page by page, and then save the
> smaller image so that next time it was snappy. Then it dawned on me:
> Isn't that was things like squid-cache do? Cache these processed
> files?

As long as you serve these images with a reasonable Expires or
Cache-Control header (absent those Squid will cache for a percentage of
the Last-Modified time, which in this case would be very short), Squid
sounds like it would be well suited for the job.

>
> So the question is: Is squid-cache (on Windows) the right tool to
> cache these images? I know that apache can be setup as a cache, but I
> don't know anything about that. Will I be better off using apache?

Use what you are comfortable with. From what I understand Apache's
caching does a fine job as an accelerator.

>
> The other question I have to ask someone, more myself then anyone...
> Am I making this too complicated by adding a proxy along with the web
> server?

Just creating these smaller images and storing them on disk (potentially
in a frequently flushed area) would certainly be another possibility.
Does windows have anything like tmpwatch?

>
> Thoughts and opinions?
>

In any case, Mark Nottingham has a nice guide to Caching at
http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/.

Chris
Received on Thu Mar 15 2007 - 15:31:05 MDT