Flow of a Typical Request

• A client connection is accepted by the client-side socket support and parsed, or is directly created via clientBeginRequest().

• The access controls are checked. The client-side-request builds an ACL state data structure and registers a callback function for notification when access control checking is completed.

• After the access controls have been verified, the request may be redirected.

• The client-side-request is forwarded up the client stream to GetMoreData() which looks for the requested object in the cache, and or Vary: versions of the same. If is a cache hit, then the client-side registers its interest in the StoreEntry. Otherwise, Squid needs to forward the request, perhaps with an If-Modified-Since header.

• The request-forwarding process begins with protoDispatch(). This function begins the peer selection procedure, which may involve sending ICP queries and receiving ICP replies. The peer selection procedure also involves checking configuration options such as never_direct and always_direct.

• When the ICP replies (if any) have been processed, we end up at protoStart(). This function calls an appropriate protocol-specific function for forwarding the request. Here we will assume it is an HTTP request.

• The HTTP module first opens a connection to the origin server or cache peer. If there is no idle persistent socket available, a new connection request is given to the Network Communication module with a callback function. The comm.c routines may try establishing a connection multiple times before giving up.

• When a TCP connection has been established, HTTP builds a request buffer and submits it for writing on the socket. It then registers a read handler to receive and process the HTTP reply.

• As the reply is initially received, the HTTP reply headers are parsed and placed into a reply data structure. As reply data is read, it is appended to the StoreEntry. Every time data is appended to the StoreEntry, the client-side is notified of the new data via a callback function. The rate at which reading occurs is regulated by the delay pools routines, via the deferred read mechanism.

• As the client-side is notified of new data, it copies the data from the StoreEntry and submits it for writing on the client socket.

• As data is appended to the StoreEntry, and the client(s) read it, the data may be submitted for writing to disk.

• When the HTTP module finishes reading the reply from the upstream server, it marks the StoreEntry as "complete". The server socket is either closed or given to the persistent connection pool for future use.

• When the client-side has written all of the object data, it unregisters itself from the StoreEntry. At the same time it either waits for another request from the client, or closes the client connection.