Problems: Squid 1.0.5 caches dynamic pages and is a cpuhog (?)

We have just changed from CERN to Squid. CERN is buggy and slow and Squid
is much nicer so we would very much like NOT going back to CERN. But...

1. [I know nothing about HTTP-protocol. I got the info below from my boss.]

   Squid caches dynamic pages! This is because very few pages are marked
   correctly. If the server answers "HTTP/1.0 201 Created" instead of
   "HTTP/1.0 201 OK", the page is dynamic and should not be cached. But
   we haven't found one single server that answers like this. Otherwise
   this would work, we put this "Created"-header in a few of our dynamic
   pages and then Squid doesn't cache them. Since we can't rely on servers
   to handle this, dynamic pages must be correctly marked. But very few
   are. CERN handles this by checking whether "Last-modified"-header exists
   or not. If it exists, the page is static, otherwise dynamic. This has
   worked fine.

   So, am I totally wrong here? In that case, please help me or we will
   have to consider going back to CERN and I don't want that.

   If I'm not wrong and this is normal Squid behaviour, what can be done?

2. Is Squid a cpuhog or have we configured it wrong or maybe to small machine?
   Some of our customers have not yet had time to alter their settings
   and are still going through CERN. Squid is presently doing 25% of the
   proxy/cache-work, CERN does the rest. But Squid uses twice the cputime
   compared to CERN.

   The Squid-process is 8 MB + 20 MB swap = 28 MB. (CERN-process is
   500 kB...) The machine has 32 MB memory, and 32 MB swap is used.
   We know that Squid uses a lot of memory, we will upgrade. Could this
   be the reason that it uses a lot of cputime?

Thanks for any comments on the above!

Peter Olsson pol@leissner.se
Received on Mon Aug 19 1996 - 02:34:53 MDT