Kitchen Soap

Just listened to Artur railing against squid and preaching the virtues of varnish. He quoted what most people quoted, which is how varnish performs serving out of *memory*.
It must be nice to have a working set that small. Until someone can show me numbers of disk-intensive (meaning, full caches, LRU eviction churning all the time) [...]

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Thanks to Mark, squid’s got a patch I’ve been wanting for a gazillion years: time-to-serve statistics that don’t include the client’s location
http://www.squid-cache.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=2345
Normally, squid’s kept statistics that included the “time” to serve an object, whether it be a HIT, MISS, NEAR HIT, etc. The clock starts for this time when the first headers are received by [...]

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Awhile back, I said I’d love to have a tool that would allow me to peek inside filesystem cache and tell me what files (or pages of files) are inside. Well Peter Zaitsev points to the fincore tool, which comes pretty damn close: you give it a file, and it will tell you which pages [...]

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Caching systems are finite in size. So what happens when your cache is filled with objects ?
No more objects ? Game over ?
Hopefully, no. Most modern caches have some form of replacement or eviction policy. What means that based on some criteria, it’ll figure out what objects to throw out the window so it [...]

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So there’s lots of excitement around Varnish, which is a caching proxy that is built to be first and foremost a reverse-proxy, as opposed to squid, which does both forward and reverse. Acceleration (reverse-proxying) is obviously important to us at Flickr, as we use squid extensively.

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Taking a look here, it seems like linking squid against TCmalloc could be pretty damn beneficial.
UPDATE: done, and tested.  not in production yet, we’ll see if I can get to it soon.

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