[squid-users] Advantages of squid?

Hi,

I'm brand new to squid and have been doing research into it and how i might
leverage its power for my application, but am having a lot of difficulty in
seeing how it might advantage my setup. I design java applications that run
on tomcat servers. Currently our java apps are running on tomcat using
apache httpd as a front end. Both tomcat and httpd are on the same server.
All requests go to apache and then are redirected to tomcat. At the moment,
tomcat is serving all content; both static and dynamic content.

At this point, I'm trying to see if there are any advantages of squid in my
setup. If I put squid in front of the apache servers, then I guess squid
will end up caching and serve any static content of the application. I
guess the big question is if there is really any advantage to this? If I
were to install squid on the same server as tomcat/httpd, how would that
accelerate any content delivery? Is it that much faster than tomcat to
find/send the data? The same total bandwidth is used sending content to the
end user, so there is no savings there, and whether it is squid or tomcat
that is sending the data, I can't forsee any significant savings there.

I guess I can see squid would end up offloading some of the processing from
tomcat, but if I were to put them on the same server, then it ends up being
the same CPU/disk that get used, so I don't see any advantages there
either - the processing power just gets shifted from one app to another.

Am I missing something? Is there something wrong in my assumptions how to
use squid?

Thanks for any insight!

Eric
Received on Sat Feb 14 2009 - 17:15:07 MST