Add Squid on single-server setup?

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Posted by kyle_mathews on February 13, 2009 at 9:36pm

Quick question -- I run a (smallish) community site on a single dedicated server that is roughly 80% anonymous traffic. I've already installed memcache and apc on my server and tuned mysql etc. so things are running pretty good. In investigating how to make my site run as fast as possible, I've run across mention of squid.

My question then is twofold -- can squid be installed on a single-server setup? Every sample setup I've seen has squid as a proxy front end to the web server so typically on a different box than the web server. Can squid be setup on the same server as its webserver?

The second part of my question is -- it worth it? My server isn't being stressed right now so my goal for installing squid would be to increase the speed at which static content is served (anonymous pages, css, js, images, etc). Would the performance increase be significantly over what I see with memcache?

Thanks in advance. I appreciate what everyone has shared already in this group -- pretty much everything I know about Drupal + high performance comes from this group and Khalid's articles over at http://2bits.com.

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Comments

You can

Posted by kbahey on February 13, 2009 at 10:00pm
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Squid can be run on the same box. What you need is to run Apache (or whatever web server you are using) on a port other than 80, and make Squid run on 80.

But if memcache is doing the job, why are you complicating things for yourself? The more components you have, the more complexity and maintenance you have to do. You can also try boost, which helps a lot with anonymous traffic and easier to setup than Squid.

If the server is running fine, then I would not add more things to it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.

Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.

That's what I was trying to

Posted by kyle_mathews on February 13, 2009 at 11:30pm
kyle_mathews's picture

That's what I was trying to figure out -- whether squid is worth the extra bother or not. It sounds like then it's not for my case. At about what point then does Squid become worth the extra complexity / maintenance?

Kyle Mathews

Kyle Mathews

boost?

Posted by greggles on February 13, 2009 at 11:54pm
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I assume you are using the Drupal page cache. Beyond that, the Boost module can provide some benefit without the additional complexity of something like squid. Perhaps Boost would give you the performance benefit that you need?

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Boost +1

Posted by DamienMcKenna on February 14, 2009 at 12:34am
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I'd also vote for trying Boost, it's relatively easy to install (I also recommend the external_pagecache patch from tag1consulting) and, like greggles said should give you what you want without going crazy installing & configuring another server-side app.

Thanks everyone for the

Posted by kyle_mathews on February 14, 2009 at 6:37am
kyle_mathews's picture

Thanks everyone for the advice. I'll try installing Boost and report back here how it goes.

Kyle Mathews

Kyle Mathews