5 ms·

But, to say it is god-awful development is pretty deeply ill-informed, and insulting to the small handful of dedicated volunteers who currently maintain Squid

by mfukar 16y ago

But, to say it is god-awful development is pretty deeply ill-informed, and insulting to the small handful of dedicated volunteers who currently maintain Squid PHK was obviously referring to a specific issue; Squid's implementation and usage of caching in its particular area of application. Varnish is obviously better at that. Squid is obviously better when it comes to portability and flexibility. I'm going to think out loud here, and please take a minute to consider this, because I'll just try to be honest, not mean or elitist: Is it enough for my software to compile and run correctly on multiple platforms for me to call it 'portable', or should I take advantage of the characteristics of each platform? I know that when it comes to my work, I choose the second, and I'm guessing that PHK would too. The "1975 programming" bunch, well, maybe not.

SwellJoe 16y ago
"Is it enough for my software to compile and run correctly on multiple platforms for me to call it 'portable', or should I take advantage of the characteristics of each platform? I know that when it comes to my work, I choose the second, and I'm guessing that PHK would too. The "1975 programming" bunch, well, maybe not." Squid supports async IO threads on Linux, has experimental (maybe stable by now) support for epoll on Linux and kpoll on FreeBSD, it automatically chooses the best option for poll/select based on the platform it is building on, uses the best available malloc (and will use alternatives if available and the build system has a retarded one; it used to include dlmalloc in the source tree just in case no acceptable malloc was available but that's probably gone by now), can run as a service on Windows, etc., etc., etc. So, Squid does both, in many regards. It not only builds and runs reliably on pretty much every platform you can throw at it, it runs better on platforms that provide the mechanisms it needs to run better (Linux and FreeBSD, in particular). It can't trivially replicate the dumb (but very fast) pipeline from net to memory to net that Varnish uses because Squid has a dozen or more access points into the data passing through. It could certainly be cleaner and simpler, and there was a zero copy patch running around for a long time for Squid 2, which never reached stability (due to the huge amount of code you have to touch to make such an idea work). Maybe Squid 3 has done something about all that, I'm not sure. Squid is not incredibly fast, but it's definitely able to take advantage of better and more modern platforms.

by mfukar 16y ago

SwellJoe 16y ago

"Is it enough for my software to compile and run correctly on multiple platforms for me to call it 'portable', or should I take advantage of the characteristics of each platform? I know that when it comes to my work, I choose the second, and I'm guessing that PHK would too. The "1975 programming" bunch, well, maybe not." Squid supports async IO threads on Linux, has experimental (maybe stable by now) support for epoll on Linux and kpoll on FreeBSD, it automatically chooses the best option for poll/select based on the platform it is building on, uses the best available malloc (and will use alternatives if available and the build system has a retarded one; it used to include dlmalloc in the source tree just in case no acceptable malloc was available but that's probably gone by now), can run as a service on Windows, etc., etc., etc. So, Squid does both, in many regards. It not only builds and runs reliably on pretty much every platform you can throw at it, it runs better on platforms that provide the mechanisms it needs to run better (Linux and FreeBSD, in particular). It can't trivially replicate the dumb (but very fast) pipeline from net to memory to net that Varnish uses because Squid has a dozen or more access points into the data passing through. It could certainly be cleaner and simpler, and there was a zero copy patch running around for a long time for Squid 2, which never reached stability (due to the huge amount of code you have to touch to make such an idea work). Maybe Squid 3 has done something about all that, I'm not sure. Squid is not incredibly fast, but it's definitely able to take advantage of better and more modern platforms.