A fun project with squid (soc?)

Right now, google is starting the soc, in order to get more open source projects and helping to the software students into participating in open source development.

Some ideas to help with squid:

In the squid list we are seeing several sites which are not working with squid due to a broken sites, this sites could not work due to a multiple factors, a fun project should be to make a software in order to test this broken sites.

Some issues with these sites are:

• ECN
• Windows Scaling
• Forgetting Vary
• Mixing up ETag (same ETag on multiple incompatible entities)
• Various malformed responses
• Double content lenght
• Malformed headers
• Repeated single-value headers

And you can help a lot of with squid too, only take a look to bugzilla.

Any more squid project related?

Squid accelerator tips to serving content when a backend server is down

We can have squid to serve stale objects although the backend server is down.

• Make sure negative_ttl is set to 0 seconds to disable the caching of errors.
• If the web server become unreachable, set the connect timeout sufficiently short. There are three different connect timeouts depending on your config and requirements:

- config_timeout: for requests going DIRECT
- peer_config_timeout: for requests going to a cache_peer
- cache_peer ... timeout=XXX: specific timeout for this cache_peer, this one override peer_config timeout.

Default values are 1 minute for requests going direct and 30 seconds for requests sent to a cache_peer.

As a general statement in accelerator setups, you want the backend connect timeout quite short, a few seconds.