Re: question about national caches

gtoal@vt.com writes:

>When I linked to it.cache.nlanr.net I configured it as a sibling.
>
>Is this the right thing to do? It occurred to me that since the
>national caches only have other caches connecting to them, not
>end users, then if their connections are all siblings they would
>never fetch any pages! So I presume at least *some* of the
>connections to the national caches treat them as parents.
>
>In that case, should I be doing so as well?

Its up to you, but you are correct that the upper level caches
are only useful if enough people use them as parents.

>Am I right in assuming that if the parent cache is down,
>my requests will go to the host web site directly, so it's
>a no-lose situation?

yes.

>I realise I will have to tell my cache the domain names
>of all the sites it might access that are closer to me than
>it.cache is, but is it a close enough approximation just
>to list my own domains for direct access and not worry
>about sites on the net between me and it.cache?

You could try the ICMP features. If your squid measures a lower
RTT than it.cache.nlanr.net does, then your cache will fetch
directly. See the "Using ICMP to Measure the Network" section
in the Squid-1.1.9 Release Notes for more info.

Duane W.
Received on Thu Apr 17 1997 - 13:03:40 MDT