Chapter 10. Talking to Other Squids

For one reason or another, you may find that you want Squid to forward its cache misses to another cache or HTTP proxy. This is necessary, for example, if you are using Squid inside a large corporate network that has one or more firewalls protecting you from the outside world. If your caching service is actually a cluster of Squid caches, you probably want them to cooperate with each other to minimize duplication of cached responses. You can also use Squid as a content router ”routing web traffic in different directions based on some aspect of the request. Or, perhaps you'd like to participate in an informal collection of caches to further improve response time and reduce wide-area network traffic.

Intercache communication is a complex undertaking, and Squid has numerous features and protocols to accomplish the task. After explaining some of the terminology and discussing the issues, I'll introduce the configuration file directives that control request routing. Following that I describe the nifty network measurement database.

Most likely, you'll use one or more of Squid's intercache protocols to assist in communicating with the other caches or proxies. The Internet Cache Protocol (ICP) is the oldest but not necessarily the best. It is widely implemented in non-Squid products, so you may need to use it for that reason alone. The newer protocols are Cache Digests, the Hypertext Caching Protocol (HTCP), and the Cache Array Routing Protocol (CARP).

There are many choices here, so I'll spend a bit of time explaining how everything works inside Squid.