Message-Id: <199711202202.OAA10371@Radar.Catch22.COM>
To: new-httpd@apache.org
Subject: Re: Want to add file caching to Apache 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 20 Nov 1997 21:47:04 GMT."
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Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 14:02:26 -0800
From: James Dornan <james@Catch22.com>
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> On Thu, 20 Nov 1997, Marc Slemko wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 20 Nov 1997, Ben Laurie wrote:
> > 
> > > Igor Tatarinov wrote:
> > > > It is relatively easy to get a high hit ratio (>80%) in a Web server
> > > > cache (see for example, http://www.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/~tatarino/pubs/static.ps
> > > > you don't need to read it entirely, just look at the graphs)
> > > 
> > > This does not agree with a study Digital did (admittedly that was of
> > > proxy caches). If I remember correctly (and it's entirely possible I
> > > don't), they got < 40% hits.
> > 
> > I think that is a critical difference.
> > 
> > Consider your 2 meg porn site that gets a million hits a day.  A cache
> > would certainly help that.

A chache would also allow web pages served from a slow long term storage 
device or an NFS mounted file system, to server commonly hit pages faster.

> 
> does it need help ?  :-)
> 
> serving static content is pretty trivial and has almost no overhead
> on reasonable hardware.
> 
> I've got a 586 Pentium 166mhz doing >20 static file requests per second
> with 90% idle cpu and a load of ~0.2 . It also acts as a mailing list
> server and nameserver when it gets bored.
> 
> I'm not knocking the idea of caching but do wonder if it's a solution
> to a relatively unimportant problem. Are there better bottlenecks to
> take a shot at widening ?

For the wider customer base it is not important, but for some high volume
sights this would be a boon.

> 
> --
> Rob Hartill                              Internet Movie Database (Ltd)
> http://www.moviedatabase.com/   .. a site for sore eyes.

-- 
-- James Dornan --