On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 5:42 AM, Helmut Hullen <Hullen@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Is there any advantage of using squid on a personal computer? I can
>> see that in a household, running squid on a central server could be
>> beneficial. What if there was only one machine in the home?
>
> It's a kind of big cache, too. You can choose which program caches - the
> browser(s) or squid.
If there's only one machine in the home, and you only use Firefox, you
would NOT see a lot of advantage from using Squid as compared to
letting Firefox directly use the same amount of cache space. Sure,
you can use the advanced features of Squid to control what gets cached
or rewrite headers, but for the latter, there are extensions to get
the same benefit. If you have multiple clients (or maybe multiple
browsers on one machine), or have a central fileserver with lots of
spare disk space, Squid starts to make more sense. For example, I
have multiple machines on a 1GB network, so on each client I set a
tiny disk cache, and let Squid cache it all centrally instead.
There is one other reason to use Squid in a small household network --
if you pass all home->Internet traffic through a firewall running
something Unix-like, use transparent redirection to route all
household traffic through squid for caching and logging. Now you can
see/cache some traffic from background programs on your PC, Boxee,
your smart BlueRay player, or your iPad or other WiFi tablet, and also
generate accounting reports (e.g. with Calamaris).
Many household devices have embedded browsers or pull content from the
Internet, but have minimal embedded caching. If you can use Squid to
cache, for example, the cover art for Netflix movies, you might speed
up browsing Netflix instant queue from Boxee?
http://forums.boxee.tv/archive/index.php/t-22038.html
Kevin
