After doing some more research, I wonder if I'm approaching the problem I want to solve the right way. I am creating a large-scale website with a large amount (terabytes) of static content. What I need is a way to scale access to my static content. I could do this many ways, but an efficient way in my mind would be to create an array of reverse-proxy cache servers that work together to represent the static content. The architecture would work like this: 1) User goes to www.mysite.com 2) The user's web browser wants to retrieve static.mysite.com/image1.jpg 3) DNS sends the HTTP request to a load balancer representing port 80 for static.mysite.com 4) Load balancer sends request to a random internal reverse proxy cache server in the cache array 5) Cache server returns image1.jpg to end user. In my example, there would be only one static apache server representing the terabytes of data. All proxies in the array would retrieve and cache files from the single web server as needed. Now, if no peering protocol is implemented (ICP, HTCP, Cache Digest, CARP) then eventually all proxies would have the same files waisting tons of cache memory. Instead, a protocol of some kind should be implemented so that the cache servers in the array act together like one big cache. That way as more servers are added to the array, the system scales to support more cached content. Any suggestions thus far? Has anyone done this? -Robert
