distcache (was RE: consider reopening 1.3)

[Geoff Thorpe <ge...@geoffthorpe.net>]

On November 17, 2003 02:22 pm, Bill Stoddard wrote:
> application environments. Being able to eliminate 1 machine in 3 due to
> scalability improvements in 2.0 probably won't be a sufficient return
> on investment for most folks. A really kick-ass load balancing/active
> fail-over feature in mod_proxy might generate some interest in 2.0
> deployed in the DMZ (features like this are significantly easier to
> implement in threaded webservers).

Which reminds me, I must find someone who would be prepared to discuss our 
distributed session caching stuff (ww.distcache.org) for use with 
apache2/mod_ssl. Any takers? There are companies out there flogging 
pretty lame and expensive SSL load-balancers and if you're running more 
than one machine for https, you're almost obliged to go down that route 
even if it hurts all your rational sense. If scalability and 
architectural flexibility are part of the argument for 2.0, would it be 
advantageous to get distcache support included into apache? Mandrake and 
Redhat already have (optional) support in their SRPMS, FWIW.

The apache glue to the distcache API is a pretty small patch - an autoconf 
check plus an additional caching module/syntax in modules/ssl/. Use of 
the alternative session cache mode is via an alternative syntax to the 
SSLSessionCache configuration parameter. We upgraded the httpd patch to 
2.0.48 recently, but on the distcache side we are in the midst of trying 
to move the "development" branch to "stable" before chasing down 
integration too hard. Last time I looked into getting our patch into the 
upstream code, there were one or two fairly important unresolved bugs in 
distcache and apache's autoconf support for openssl/ssl-c needed quite a 
bit of reorganisation. I helped with the latter at that time, and we 
sorted out the remaining issues in distcache shortly after. So ... if 
there's anyone on the apache side who'd be prepared to look deeper into 
this and discuss integration with apache, please make contact with me off 
the list.

Cheers,
Geoff

-- 
Geoff Thorpe
geoff@geoffthorpe.net
http://www.geoffthorpe.net/