Matt Clark wrote:
Case in point: A first time visitor hits your home page. A
dynamic page is generated (in about 1 second) and served
(taking 2 more seconds) which contains links to 20 additional
The gain from an accelerator is actually even more that that, as it takes
essentially zero seconds for Apache to return the generated content (which
in the case of a message board could be quite large) to Squid, which can
then feed it slowly to the user, leaving Apache free again to generate
another page. When serving dialup users large dynamic pages this can be a
_huge_ gain.
I think Martin's pages (dimly recalling another thread) take a pretty long
time to generate though, so he may not see quite such a significant gain.
Correct the 75% of all hits are on a script that can take anywhere from
a few seconds to a half an hour to complete. The script essentially
auto-flushes to the browser so they get new information as it arrives
creating the illusion of on demand generation.
A squid proxy would probably cause severe problems when dealing with a
script that does not complete output for a variable rate of time.
As for images, CSS, javascript and such the site makes use of it, but in
the grand scheme of things the amount of traffic they tie up is
literally inconsequential. Though I will probably move all of that
onto another server just to allow the main server the capabilities of
dealing with almost exclusively dynamic content.
Martin Foster
Creator/Designer Ethereal Realms
martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
