Re: modules

I'm a Web caching researcher, not a Squid developer. I gather that
the Squid dev team is discussing design issues for the next major
release. Two suggestions:

  1. Modularize in such a way that any reasonable replacement
     policy can easily be installed. Recent research suggests
     that policies such as GreedyDual-Size and variants of LFU
     offer substantial advantages over LRU-based algorithms.
     Squid will be a better product if admins can decide the
     replacement policy at install/configuration time; it shouldn't
     be hard-wired.

  2. In the access logs, could you include a hash/checksum of the
     requested URL? My work depends on access logs, and it would
     help me to distinguish between cacheable/dynamic content if
     I had a hash of the data payload (excluding HTTP header).
     A last mod time for each URL would be useful too. As things
     now stand, when I see requests for "http://foo.com/" in the
     access logs with slightly different transfer sizes, I can't
     know for sure whether the document has changed, or whether
     the HTTP header has changed.

Squid access logs such as those collected & published by NLANR are
extremely valuable to researchers like myself. They'd be even more
valuable if the one or two low-cost changes above were included.
Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 13:15:58 MDT