Re: [ILUG] Making squid work

From: john.allen at domain online.ie
Date: Sun 07 Oct 2001 - 17:46:07 IST


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 domain online.ie
OpenSource Developer                    :
                                      www: http://udk.sf.net
                                    phone: intl+353-14937616
                                         : intl+353-862315986


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:12:36 GMT