Router + Wingate instead of squid ?

[happyhacking]

Hi, im a old school squid user, but as of later versions i have seen a drop in performance caching content, and i found Wingate as a very promising replacement, my doubt is at connectivity level, since im using a main enterprise firewall which takes care of all the security in several vlans, actually the firewall redirects http traffic to the squid appliance on dmz at default port 3128 and everything works flawless, just the very low hit rate, the main server for squid is a dual quad core proccesor with 128GB of RAM and 4 SAS 15k rpm drives, im wondering if i can first use it on my lan setup and secondly, wingate software can use all the resources on server ?

[adrien]

Hi

WinGate supports proxying in the case you mention, however you need to enable it in the web proxy under the "web server" tab. In that tab the default "site" determines by default what happens when a server-style request is received by WinGate.

When you're diverting connections to WinGAte from a router, the connection and request appears to WinGate as a server request - where the client is making a request that treats WinGate like a server (the form of the request line in an HTTP request is different between requests to servers and requests to proxies).

So you just set the action for the default site to be "Proxy". This causes WinGate to use the host header to determine where to connect, since the original source IP information is lost in the forwarding (unless the router is routing via WinGate instead of forwarding connections to it - in which case WinGate's standard intercepting config will work).

As for WinGate using all the resources. WinGate is a 32 bit app, so won't use all that RAM, but there's no limit to the amount of disk space WinGate will use - you can set up any number of cache volumes.

One reason you may be seeing a reduced hit-count in squid though may not be due to squid itself, but more to do with how sites are changing. For instance many sites are now https only, or go to more and more extreme lengths to suppress caching. If you want to cache https traffic, you'd need to turn on https inspection, and that won't work with forwarded connections - the clients need to be configured to use the proxy, and have a certificate installed etc.

Regards

Adrien

[happyhacking]

Many thanx for your detailed answer, i'll give it a try with a smaller server, there is any chance about a 64bit version in the near future ?

[adrien]

HI

a 64 bit version is on our roadmap, but there actually hasn't been a strong incentive for engineering purposes.

WinGate just doesn't use that much RAM, even in larger sites with thousands of users, WinGate will rarely use over 500MB. So we're not close to the limits of running a 32 bit app.

There are cases where WinGate will benefit from more RAM in a system though when running on 64 bit windows, and that's related to the memory the OS uses for file system caching. If you have a lot of RAM, the OS will use it to cache data read from disk, so WinGate will still benefit from this, especially for caching, since commonly served cache files will end up being served from memory via the file system cache.

Regards

Adrien

[happyhacking]

It would be possible to make a ramdisk and use it for caching to take advantage of the available ram ? If yes how wingate will deal with him after a reboot ?

[adrien]

you could use a RAM disk, but it would be volatile, it would just look to WinGate like any disk, but once the RAM loses power, it's gone. So you'd need to keep the computer running.

[happyhacking]

Hi, im updating the info on this thread and i should note that the Wingate Proxy works perfectly in my setup, and in a little more complicated environment since my firewall diverts http requests to wingate wich connects to a privoxy running on the same server, as a side note im using all my RAM with a memory caching software, so im very happy with this setup. I would like to note that the configuration to tune the caching process is a little complicated but it looks very powerful, i hope perhaps later on we can select agressive caching policy's.

Thanx in advance, btw, there is any academic discounts ?

[adrien]

Hi

Glad to hear it's working well for you.

Yes we do offer a fairly sizeable academic discount. Send an email through to sales@qbik.com for more information.

Regards

Adrien