[users@httpd] Using apache as proxy with another Apache and JBoss

[DGeorgie@xxxxxxxxx]

hi,

One of our J2EE applications is running
on JBoss/Tomcat server and all the requests are coming  from Apache
using JK connector. The OS is RedHat EL 3.0.

The application is very reach in multimedia
content which is stored as BLOB objects in an Oracle database. Because
of them the database is 40 GB big and growing. Initially the application
would load the BLOB objects on request into the memory and cache them.
Unfortunately it would consume lots of memory (up to 2 GB) when the number
of users increases or the users would start requesting more and more multimedia
content (Flas, movie, audio etc files).  

Squid was introduced to the configuration
as external cache and managed to increase the performance and scalability
of the application. Up to some point. Even with Squid enabled the application
doesn't scale well.

We are looking now into different approaches
to off-load the BLOB objects from the SQL server into the file system served
by Apache. That would reduce the database size to probably few hundred
MB and increase the response times from the SQL server. The idea is to
keep the multimedia content out of the application/JBoss  memory space.
In this scenario one Apache web server would work as proxy and serve the
multimedia files from the file system located on the same box. All other
apache servers would access this proxy when multimedia content would be
requested and send the rest of the requests to the application on JBoss.

The only obstacle we have is how to
make sure that only authenticated users have access to the multimedia files.
Any ideas?

Thanks,

Dimitar