Re: [squid-users] Advantages of Squid

Dear Kumar,
I've been using Squid in my ISP for the past 2 years, and here are the
advantages:
- Getting a super/kickass hardware with Squid costs 10 times less than
a BlueCoat, so if you have the budget of a BlueCoat, you can get
10xSquids, imagine the things you can do in terms of Load
Balancing/HTPC/ICP/Fail Over so on and so forth.
- In a medium/large ISP (10 000 concurrent to 60 000 concurrent) i
found that 1 machine can handle easily 80-100 Mbit, the more drives
you have on that machine, the more you'll be able to reply fast that's
why i use SAS drives 15 000 RPM. You can also get machines with 16 GB
(or more) of RAM and put all your cache in the RAM, but in this case,
i'll set the largest caching size to be around 1024 KB. Oh and if
you're gonna go above 4GB of RAMs, consider 64bit, actually, it's not
much of a consideration, it's a must.
- You get to learn and know how caching really works, you're not just
configuring a black box from a fancy web page.
- You get to upgrade/patch your system to suit your needs (there are a
few useful patches for Squid out there)

I always promised my self i'd write a good howto for Squid in ISPs,
but i can't find the time..., stick around though, i'm sure i'll do
soon enough.

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 3:32 PM, Amos Jeffries <squid3_at_treenet.co.nz> wrote:
> bijayant kumar wrote:
>>
>> Hello to lists,
>>
>> I was meeting a consultant to an ISP today who plans to implement a
>> caching solution for his network. I guess they are already impressed with
>> Blue Coats which undoubtedly seems to be a very good product which I have
>> not used or seen physically.
>>
>> Being a staunch believer of Open source (though not very knowledgeable
>> technically), I am convinced that Squid would also nowhere be less than
>> BlueCoats or any other commercial product. I would seek help from friends
>> who have the knowledge, to share the features of Squid in terms of cache
>> management and why Squid may be better that other caching solutions
>> available in the market. It may be noted that the client is not interested
>> to discuss financial advantage but would be more keen to learn about the
>> technical advantages.
>
> To play devils advocate, BlueCoat have had M$ to throw at pure grunt and
> streamlining. Squid still lacks a bit of that. Making up for it in a rich
> set of control abilities, not to mention your ability to hack a fix to the
> code if anything particularly troublesome gets found.
>
>>
>> Any pointers would be highly appreciated. I would love to see squid
>> cluster deployed at a site handling around 10Gbps of traffic.
>>
>
> For Big Users (TM), the the most well known high-bandwidth users of Squid
> are ...
>
> Yahoo! ...
> http://www.mnot.net/blog/2007/04/29/squid
> (Mark answers most of your questions right there in the blog.)
>
> and Wikipedia ...
> http://www.nedworks.org/~mark/presentations/hd2006/
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware
>
> who even have their cluster configuration out in public:
> http://www.scribd.com/doc/43868/Wikipedia-site-internals-workbook-2007
>
>
> Amos
> --
> Please use Squid 2.7.STABLE4 or 3.0.STABLE8
>

-- 
Sincerely,
Haytham EL-KHOUJA
haytham_at_khouja.net