On Thursday 07 February 2008 09:13, Henrik K wrote: > On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 10:12:32PM -0500, Chris Woodfield wrote: > > On Feb 6, 2008, at 3:44 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote: > >>> I see Apache can also do reverse proxy, which was surprising to me, > >>> or > >>> is it not quite the same thing? > >> > >> Sort of. :) > > > > Apache's ProxyPass module performs similar proxying functionality, but > > without squid's caching abilities, so you won't get any traffic- > > offloading benefits, which really is squid's raison d'etre - the other > > benefits Adrian mentioned are more or less side benefits. > > Is Apache's caching so bad it's not worth mentioning? It definately has the > ability. I know an ex-Plone person, who used to use the Apache proxying function in front of Zope. We benchmarked that on vanilla x86 test box (think low end Pentium). Zope default config could serve about 3 "static" images a second (or some such hideous result!). Apache proxying boosted this to several hundred images a seconds. It was literally a line or two of rewrite rules in the Apache2 config file. I think where you are just trying to proxy something like Zope (i.e. same server), and there is other Apache config involved (i.e. you want to serve some content via other means - such as a bit of PHP, or a bit of server side includes, or simple static content outside of Zope, or even Apache custom errors), then the Apache proxy using "Rewrite" is a lot easier than introducing a whole new squid install into the equation, and performance was acceptable. I don't think the Zope crowd use ProxyPass much, they use RewriteRules. With the RewriteRules it is much like typical Apache configuration, and you can exercise detailed control of the proxy behaviour in the Apache rewrite rules. Which would I think is slightly easier than trying to do the same in squid.conf. If it was "everything in Zope", no Apache anything, then a reverse Squid proxy is easier than using Apache as "just a proxy". Once you start getting multiple Zope servers, then you get into a whole new ball game, and the Zope folk will sell you stuff to make it work nicely as I understand it. I didn't get involved in that, I was just working with the guy to understand how it all fitted together initially, and on one occaison to stop his Apache box being an open proxy (grr - read the log files people!). Disclaimer - whilst I know one of the guys working on the Apache proxy rules, I don't bother him with my questions on how to use it. On the other hand, reading his blog, the proxying behaviour should be even better in future versions of Apache!
