sean.upton@uniontrib.com wrote:
I have a question, for anyone experienced in working with Zope and caching proxies:
I'm setting up a load-balanced server farm that has nodes that will run Apache and proxy (via mod_proxy) to ZEO clients running ZServer. This farm is routed (both ways) through a layer 4 load-balancing appliance, and all these boxes (both nodes and the balancer) are sitting inside a DMZ with private IP addresses. The public world will access these servers via a firewall box running transparent proxy (actually, I guess, similar to squid's http_accel mode; the semantics here are a bit tricky, as it's more of a inverse trans-proxy). Between Apache and Zope, there would be several virtual hosts, and I'd be using the SiteAccess product. It gets a bit tricky in that I need to access several different virtual hosts inside the DMZ (one for the ZEO farm, and another for a dedicated CGI-based ad server on another box) via the proxy. A more detailed (ascii art) diagram of what I am trying to do, is at http://209.132.8.98/server_ascii_art.txt
My question is this: does anybody have any thoughts on the merits of Squid (http accelerator mode) versus Apache/mod_proxy in terms of caching, virtual hosts, and the like when working with Zope sites? Any big pitfalls to this kind of setup with Zope sites?
I would prefer Squid since its only purpose in life is caching. It follows the "do one thing and do it well" mantra. But whatever your choice, I hope you make use of the new CacheManagement feature in Zope 2.3. It is designed to make things like this straightforward and easy. There's a recent news announcement that links to everything you need--including complete help docs! Shane