Sam Carleton wrote:
I have been using squid-cache at home on my firewall for years now, I use it for the normal standard old stuff of simply caching of where we surf. I am writing a new kiosk based software package that has a GUI app as the front end for the operator and apache is serving up the pages to the web browser clients. What is being served up are images. The images that come into the GUI app are full size images, 4 megapixel on up. Current what I am doing is after my software copies the full size images into the computer, it then creates the two different web images, one is a small thumbnail (120x180) the other is a larger image for the screen (400x600). When one is doing this to 200 images at one time, it takes a while, too long in my opinion. My first though was to have the indexing page detect if the smaller images where there and create them, page by page, and then save the smaller image so that next time it was snappy. Then it dawned on me: Isn't that was things like squid-cache do? Cache these processed files?
As long as you serve these images with a reasonable Expires or Cache-Control header (absent those Squid will cache for a percentage of the Last-Modified time, which in this case would be very short), Squid sounds like it would be well suited for the job.
So the question is: Is squid-cache (on Windows) the right tool to cache these images? I know that apache can be setup as a cache, but I don't know anything about that. Will I be better off using apache?
Use what you are comfortable with. From what I understand Apache's caching does a fine job as an accelerator.
The other question I have to ask someone, more myself then anyone... Am I making this too complicated by adding a proxy along with the web server?
Just creating these smaller images and storing them on disk (potentially in a frequently flushed area) would certainly be another possibility. Does windows have anything like tmpwatch?
Thoughts and opinions?
In any case, Mark Nottingham has a nice guide to Caching at http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/.
Chris
