K K wrote:
Have you considered running one of the machines as an NTP server, have the others sync their clock to that?
no, one of the machines is shared hosting so i don't have access to run my own ntpd on it.
Yes, explicit 'Expires' headers help squid make smarter decisions. If you know an object is going to be good indefinitely (e.g. a GIF for a logo), then setting a very long expiration date will ensure squid doesn't bother checking with the origin server. You might want to also reconsider 'Cache-Control: max-age=300'
reconsider in what way? the pages i am most interested in cache-controlling are news hub pages, and they should be good for 5 minutes, tops. otherwise the cached version is in danger of falling too far behind the 'real' news feed.
i guess i don't really understand the difference between doing Expires: now plus 5 minutes (in apache speak) and Cache-Control: max-age=300
-jsd-