[squid-users] persistent_request_timeout, entourage and outlook : retrieving distant images in HTML email

Hi,

We are using Squid as a http proxy. Web clients are able
to load webpages through it without any problems. However,
images linked in an HTML email hosted on a remote server
(be it Apache or IIS) took a long time to load (2 to 10
minutes for 8 images, which is rather too much).
Using web browsers (Firefox, Konqueror, IE6/7) to load the
images worked fine, so we suspected the email clients
(Outlook and Entourage) to be the culprits.

BTW, this awfully looked like the same problem as this one :
http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Mac/microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage/2007-04/msg00053.html

Setting persistent_request_timeout to 0 :
persistent_request_timeout 0 seconds
solved the problem without any measurable adverse effect on
our end.

Are there any drawbacks to this workaround ?

Maybe this should go into the FAQ...

For the record, both Squid version squid-2.6.STABLE6-5.el5_1.2
(CentOS 5.1) and 3.0.STABLE1 (on CentOS 5.1) had the problem.

Best regards,

François Cami
Received on Mon Feb 04 2008 - 09:16:20 MST