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LinuxPlanet: Do-It-Yourself Caching: Squid 2.3 – Why Caching is Essential

“Caching is an important function for a wide variety of
Internet-related concerns, as ISPs, educational institutions and
corporations all find that it measurably enhances system
performance. There are a host of commercial caching products on
the market, but perhaps the most popular is Squid, the open-source
cache originally produced by the ARPA Harvest project and now
maintained by the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research
(NLANR).

“That’s why you should be interested in running Squid if you’re
doing any sort of Web serving. In this article, we’ll explore Squid
configuration and test its capabilities under real-world
circumstances.”

“Chances are pretty good that you already have Squid, since
virtually every Linux distribution includes Squid in both source
code and a precompiled binary (Slackware Linux, for instance,
offers Squid in its installation process). You can also download
source code by following links from the Squid home page. Squid can
compile and run on minimal hardware, but experience shows that a
stable Squid cache requires at least 128 MB of RAM and several GB
of disk storage. Performance of course varies widely, affected by
many factors: CPU, memory, disk, Squid configuration and kernel
tuning.”

Complete
Story

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