Reverse/Server-Side Proxy Caching for Windows?

Posted by Cliff on Monday January 5, 2004 @10:26PM from the living-in-a-microsoft-world dept.

frooyo asks: "I'm an currently looking for a good reverse proxy caching solution (server-side caching) for the Windows platform. This would be used as a transparent proxy between the corporate website and the outside world. Products that I have seen available include: Microsoft ISA server, Squid for NT and some others. I'm not completely opposed to using a non-windows platform for this type of solution, but I would prefer a Windows solution. I need a product that handles middle-large numbers of current users (10-30) with easy on one server. Additionally features such as caching pools and easy handling of FTP connections (since this will be used as a 'transparent' proxy) would be a much needed benefit."

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Squid is good by Earlybird · 2004-01-05 22:42 · Score: 5, Informative

Squid is a very good, well-designed, highly configurable proxy server implementation. I have not gauged its performance against other implementations, but performance, at least on Linux, seems entirely reasonable. It is popularly used to cache Zope sites.
Being a relatively ancient open-source Unix program, it adheres religiously to standards, and will correctly use headers such as Expires and Cache-Control to maintain cache coherence; Squid will correctly cache anything with a Last-Modified header.
Additionally, it supports upstream commands allowing your web server to tell Squid to invalidate cache records when content changes; you can implement this easily in server-side languages such as PHP, Java or Python (Zope's caching machinery supports this transparently).