Preferred Caching Method for the Web?

Leto2 asks: "I was wondering what the preferred way of setting up a local cache is. Since I'm low on RAM, and my computer swaps a lot, I installed a squid-proxy on a spare computer in my room. But now I wonder, would it be beneficial to use a squid-proxy instead of a Netscape/IE disk-cache in general? Are there differences between the caching-mechanisms that would make one preferable over the other."

Comments

WSProxy

[strredwolf]

I've written up a Perl proxy for 1 person use that blocks ads and does some resemblance of caching. It's called wsproxy. Check freshmeat for the listing.

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Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack

Use Squid for your cache

[dweezil]

I run Squid on a P75 with 32 MB RAM. The workstations are both PII 300's with 64 MB and 128 MB RAM respectively. Netscape is configured to use a RAM cache and no disk cache. Squid has a 100 MB disk cache.

The Squid cache may be slower over 10 Mbps than on a local disk but my Internet connection is a 56K modem, and even the Squid cache is faster than that. Even if you have cable modem or DSL at 1.5 Mbps, Squid will still be faster.

Squid can also be used as part of a firewall, can block Doubleclick.net and other annoying people, and gives you nice HTML page when there are errors. All in all, Squid makes a nice addition to any home network.

Re:Use WWWOFFLE for your cache

[spuk]

You can also use wwwoffle. It's a caching proxy server with features for use with dial-up connections. It lets you browse the pages offline as if you were online, select pages while offline for download when you go online, sort of refresh policies for pages, etc.
Take a look at the website: http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/ .
Debian has a package for it.

One user!=squid. 2+ users=squid.

[SwellJoe]

If you are the only user on your cache, then Squid is overkill (and resource hungry overkill at that). But if you have 2 or more users who will occasionally visit the same sites, then Squid is well worth implementing.

The benefit of Squid is not necessarily in it's method of caching, but that it caches everyone who proxies through it. The more users you have for your cache, the better it works. All of those users are there filling the cache every day with the sites they visit, so that the next time anyone of the network visits that site, it pops up instantly.

Also, since a dedicated Squid box will often have a lot more room (hundreds of megabytes or several gigabytes) of hard disk space and quite a bit of RAM devoted to the cache than the Netscape/IE cache on most single users systems, you get more effective caching.

In short, a dedicated proxy can do some nice things for you, like block ads, porn, whatever. Squid can also allow you to browse entirely offline (just put it into never_direct mode) as long as you've visited a page before. It generally does things as well as or better than the builtin cache of your browser.

In a small office, school, whatever, environment a squid box is just priceless. Saves bandwidth and makes things fast fast fast. But for one user, there really just isn't much point in it, unless you do have an overloaded workstation and you want to offload the caching job to a separate box. Then it makes perfect sense.

SquidGuard...

[Spoing]

Yes, if Squid is overkill...SquidGuard is even more so. While it's primarily a filter, filters can have a speed benifit by not grabbing and caching data that isn't wanted.

SquidGuard is an improvement over using Squid+Junkbuster, and is said not to suffer from some of the compatibility problems Junkbuster has (Hotmail, ...). If you're curious, take a look.