Tux, Varnish or Squid?
We need a web content accelerator for static images to sit in front of our Apache web front end servers
Our previous hosting partner used Tux with great success and I like the fact it's part of Red Hat Linux which we're using, but its last update was in 2006 and there seems little chance of future development. Our ISP recommends we use Squid in reverse caching proxy role.
Any thoughts between Tux and Squid? Compatibility, reliability and future support are as important to us as performance.
Also, I read in other threads here about Varnish; anyone have any real-world experience of Varnish compared with Squid, and/or Tux, gained in high-traffic environments?
Cheers
Ian
UPDATE: We're testing Squid now. Using ab to pull the same image 10,000 times with a concurrency of 100, both Apache on its own and Squid/Apache burned through the requests very quickly. But Squid made only a single request to Apache for the image then served them all from RAM, whereas Apache alone had to fork a large number of workers in order to serve the images. It looks like Squid will work well in freeing up the Apache workers to handle dynamic pages.
Answer
In my experience varnish is much faster than squid, but equally importantly it's much less of a black box than squid is. Varnish gives you access to very detailed logs that are useful when debugging problems. It's configuration language is also much simpler and much more powerful that squid's.