Making the most of your Internet Connection
Squid is used by hundreds of Internet Providers world-wide to provide their users with the best possible web access. Squid optimises the data flow between client and server to improve performance and caches frequently-used content to save bandwidth. Squid can also route content requests to servers in a wide variety of ways to build cache server hierarchies which optimise network throughput.
The following is a very simple diagram for a network using Squid server :
Another possoble setup is to forward only HTTP requests to Cache server using distation-nat rules in the router as in the following diagram :
Deploying Squid for larger ISPs
Larger ISPs who provide internet to multiple large areas need to use several cache servers to enhance their service , in this topology we can use the Internet Cache Protocol (ICP) that comes with Squid to exchange cached objects between different servers.
When HTTP request comes from AREA 1 , the following scenario will happen :
- Squid X will search the cache for the request object.
- If the object found , will get served to the client.
- If object not found , Squid X will query Squid Y & Z for the object
- if object found , it will be fetched from one of the servers.
- if object not found in any server , Squid X will fetch the object from the Internet.
The same will happen with Squid Y & Z.