[geeks] faster www cache

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>Date: 2006/09/07 Thu PM 12:15:11 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: [geeks] faster www cache

>I've been running squid for years as my WWW cache.
>
>Yesterday I decided to look at the statistics and they are
>disappointing.
>
>I'm the only user on my personal LAN, and I so I have a smallish 1GB
>squid cache.
>
>I only get about an 8% hit rate, which is making me wonder if there is
>any point to running it.  It doesn't even make a blip in process time so
>I'm not worried about that part, but I wonder if I'm getting any real
>benefit to using the caching.

You'd have to return to cached pages (or pages that refer to cached elements) before they expire to see any benefit from the cache. Also, the pages (or elements) you revisit are most likely cached in your browser cache, preventing squid for "scoring a hit".

>Most pages are dynamic these days, so a lot can't be cached, but it
>still seems like it should be higher.

Most pages have dynamic components, but also include static elements - those static elements would be eligible for retrieval from Squid.

>Then again, maybe the cachemgr.cgi program doesn't really tell the right
>story.

Dunno about that...

>Could it be squid just isn't appropriate for personal use?  Tuning
>issue?

My gut says that unless you have a small browser cache, and you vist the same sites repeatedly, there is minimal benefit to running a cache for a single user. If you re-deployed that one gig as the browser cache I think you'd see a bigger benefit (when the browser cache is hit, the netowrk overhead is eliminated if retrieved from local cache)...

Lionel