[ILUG] Squid vs Browser cache

[Fergal Daly]

At 07:58 19/02/00 -0500, Subba Rao wrote:
>Thanks for replying. I set the Browser's (Netscape) to 0, but it looks
>like Squid is not cacheing. The ppp0 interface, shows inbound traffic
>each time I visit a site. This is not the first time I am going to that
>site. I go to the site back and forth to test, and ppp0 shows inbound
>traffic. What flags in Squid.conf, should I look for? How do I configure
>squid to update the DB every 15 minutes instead of every hour?

Squid could be checking the last modified time of the page to make sure
there isn't a more recent one before serving the cached copy. If you look
in the squid logs, every entry gives a size, if the size is around 4-5
hundred bytes then it means that it just checked the change time but didn't
download the page.

Many news sites etc. have dynamically generated pages which set are set to
expire immediately, so they are never cached. Make sure you're going to a
static webpage, try a page served by apache on your own machine or a simple
homepage on an ISP. 

I'm not sure what DB you're taling about, do you mean the cache of stored
web pages? I haven't ever seen squid set to do updates at set intervals.
Whenever I have set up squid, it followed the standard HTTP caching rules
ie. look at the headers (and possibly meta tags, not sure) for details of
how long this to keep the page for before it must reload it. If it is
possible to over ride this and tell it to keep everything for at least 1
hour, I don't know how to do this. I'm not sure I'd want to do it either,
do you want to have to hit shift+reload every time you want to see the
latest slashdot/freshmeat/any page which changes several times in an hour?

Fergal