[Zope] ANNOUNCE: Pound - reverse proxy and load balancer - v1.0

[Casey Duncan]

Caching has nothing to do with bandwidth and everything to do with handling large numbers of requests per second. Something Squid excels at. Caching removes load from the Zope server as well, potentially increasing the responsiveness of non-cached pages too.

That said, Pound looks like a pretty cool piece of software.

-Casey

On Thu, 31 Oct 2002 11:43:27 -0500
Eron Lloyd <elloyd@lancaster.lib.pa.us> wrote:

> Awesome! This seems like a great app...Squid seems like a bear to setup for 
> proxy handling, yet this is designed much simpler (and efficient!). Does 
> Squid provide much more than Pound (besides caching and now ESI)? When does 
> it make sense to use Squid vs. Pound? I imagine Pound would be more 
> appropriate on a faster pipe, where caching isn't as big an issue...
> 
> Thanks for new release!
> 
> Eron
> 
> On Thursday 31 October 2002 10:33 am, Robert Segall wrote:
> > This is to announce the release of Pound v1.0.
> >
> > New in this release:
> >
> > - Pound is now declared to be production-quality code
> > - fixed a few minor problems, such as the ordering of certificate file
> > - removed thread auto clean-up due to a bug in the Linux implementation of
> > libpthread
> > - added support for additional WebDAV commands (Microsoft-style)
> > - restructured request match patterns
> > - added support for HA ports for back-end hosts
> > - added support for optional HTTPS extra header
> >
> > The software is at version 1.0 (production quality). Further testing
> > (especially under heavy loads), improvements and suggestions are welcome.
> >
> > What is Pound (from the Web page)
> >
> > - a reverse-proxy: it passes requests from client browsers to one or more
> > back-end servers.
> > - a load balancer: it will distribute the requests from the client browsers
> > among several back-end servers, while keeping session information.
> > - an SSL wrapper: Pound will decrypt HTTPS requests from client browsers
> > and pass them as plain HTTP to the back-end browsers.
> > - an HTTP/HTTPS sanitizer: Pound will verify requests for correctness and
> > accept only well-formed ones.
> > - an HTTP/1.1 to 1.0 proxy.
> > - a fail-over-server: should a back-end server fail, Pound will take note
> > of the fact and stop passing requests to it until it recovers.
> > - a request redirector - it will pass client requests to separate groups of
> > servers, based on required URL and the presence or absence of headers
> > (pattern matching)
> >
> > Pound was specifically developed to serve as a front-end for multiple
> > instances of Zope running on top of a common ZEO storage, but can be used
> > with any other web server. A patch for the Python source of z2.py is
> > available as part of the distribution to allow using Pound's SSL
> > capabilities.
> >
> > Pound is currently in use in several medium to large volume sites and seems
> > to be holding up quite well: largest reported site does about 3.5 million
> > requests per day, peaking at over 300 requests per second. The speed is
> > well superior to other, equivalent solutions, the configuration is much
> > simpler and the necessary resources (CPU, RAM, disk) are much, much lower.
> >
> > Pound is distributed under the GPL.
> >
> > For further information, download, etc. please see
> > http://www.apsis.ch/pound
> >
> > Enjoy and let me know how it works for you.
> 
> 
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