cacheboy 1.0 released

Cacheboy 1.0 has been tagged, tarballed and port'ed. Its been in production at my beta testers site for a week or so now and hasn't missed a beat.

There's a lot more work to do to Cacheboy to shape it up like I believe Squid should've been; a stable 1.0 release is the first step along this path.

I'll let this settle for a couple weeks (ie, Adrian needs to sit his mid-year exams in two weeks!) before I begin some more larger-scale code refactoring and shuffling around.

Cacheboy-1.1 changes will include MemBuf, cbdata, most of the http request/reply/header manipulation code and potentially a little of the filedescriptor, disk, event and network communication code. This stuff forms the "core" of Squid/Cacheboy. I'll then look at some basic infrastructure changes to support IPv6 clients.

Like the Cacheboy-1.0 changes, these will not be terribly difficult or intrusive (the IPv6 client-only changes will be the most intrusive by far!) but a lot of refactoring, rewriting and shuffling about of the core needs to take place before I can begin work on the necessary stuff - HTTP/1.1, SMP, modularity, performance.

FreeBSD port update

I've updated the port to CACHEBOY_0.PRE6; it also now defaults to the replacement shiny english errors (NewEnglish) rather than the default ones (English).

Revalidating objects in Polygraph

I have a locally hacked up polygraph config based on datacomm-1. Datacomm-1 is a very simple workload which doesn't pretend to be the real world at all; it thus makes it really easy for me to implement custom bits of polygraph to test specific things.

One thing I needed to test was object revalidation. I needed objects to be revalidated in a relatively short period of time so I could trigger a storage revalidation bug in Squid-2.HEAD.

Here's the changes.

include/content.pg; added:

ObjLifeCycle olcRevalid = {

  length = const(2min);   

  variance = 50%;

  with_lmt = 100%;

  expires = [

    lmt + const(2min) : 5%,

    now + const(5min) : 15%

  ];

};

content cntRevalid = {

  kind = "revalid";

  obj_life_cycle = olcRevalid;

  size = logn(32KB, 32KB);

  cachable = 80%;

  checksum = 1%;

};

I then edited my locally modified datacomm-1.pg to set the contents to cntRevalid.

Now, I get stale objects popping up during the test - and I need to figure out why -that- is happening - but note that my life cycles are very quick (couple minutes). squid _should_ be good down to object lifetime of 1 second so I'm a bit surprised.

In any case, it tripped the bug, which is all that matters..

Cacheboy PRE6 is out

I've just rolled PRE6. This includes the Squid-2.HEAD fix for the signed vs unsigned comparison bug I introduced earlier (which lead to a crash.)

This code -should- be stable enough for public consumption.

Error page update, phase 2

I've gone and modified all the English error pages in my little playpen project.

Here's an example of a live DNS failure. Same (confusing) text with Squid; slightly nicer layout.

Errors shouldn't be ugly

Part of my "things i hate about Squid" list includes the god awful error pages which haven't really changed since .. well, since I got involved with the project in 2000.

Here's my take on the "simple" error page. The text is exactly the same as the old error page (note that I haven't included the "Generated by.." footer text here, as thats included by Squid/Cacheboy) but I've reformatted the error page to use CSS for layout and then crafted a very simple example CSS.