[ILUG] Making squid work

[john.allen at online.ie]

Niall O Broin wrote:

> Well, I finally have my caching DNS server running (although only with a
> forwarder - wouldn't work otherwise but that doesn't much bother me as it
> seems only sensible to use my provider's server as a forwarder as it's
> likely to have a lot of what I want cached.
> 
> But I'm now puzzled by the behaviour of squid. I use a number of sites on a
> regular basis which use quite a number of static graphics but it seems that
> squid doesn't cache them (actually, it does, but it doesn't give them back -
> stay with me).
> 
> Test setup is as follows:
> 
> Netscape 4.77 with disk caching turned off (shouldn't need it, if squid's
> doing its thing).
> 
> Squid Version 2.3.STABLE4-hno.CVS as delivered with SuSE 7.2 with the cache
> emptied and remade with squid -z. A marker file is created called /tmp/SQUID.
> 
> Take for example  www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives, a site which I
> visit now and then :-) This has about a dozen static GIFs - they're the same
> every day, and the page totals about 60K. I expect that when I get that page
> squid will cache all the GIFs and the next time I get the page, the GIFs
> will just flow in nicely from my squid cache but that's not what happens.
> 
> I start Netscape and load the page and wait about 20 seconds while it all
> loads up. Then I use find on the squid cache to find files newer than the
> marker - sure enough, all the GIFs from the page are there in the cache  (as
> are a number of files like  squid-internal-static/icons/anthony-?????.gif
> where ????? is movie, trab, bomb and various others - what on earth are
> they ?, although that's a separate question)
> 
> Then I quit Netscape and start it again and load the same page - again I
> must wait until they're downloaded from userfriendly - they're certainly NOT
> coming out of the squid cache. In the squid access log I get a load of
> TCP_CLIENT_REFRESH_MISS/200  lines for each of these GIFs and in the store
> log I get a load of RELEASE and SWAPOUT lines for each of them.
> 


Well using Mozilla, with Squid on MDK 8.1 and everyhing works fine, all
the time. I'm sure I did have similar problems with older versions of 
Squid, and some sites set the Pragma: nocache in their responses.

I checked with userfreindly.org, and the cache constantly reloads some
gif because it has a ? on the end of it. It also tried www.inpho.ie, and
no MISSes at all, even after clearing the Moz cache.





-- 
John Allen                         email: john.allen at online.ie
OpenSource Developer                    :
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