Hi,

I am exploring the opportunities using nginx. Here is the use case:

Backend server has many static files that need to be delivered to clients fast.

Frontend has many smaller servers each with nginx installed. The incoming traffic can be load-balanced or round-robin balanced to the frontend nginx cluster.

Each node will try to serve the file from its local file cache. If it cannot find the cache locally, it will need to contact the other frontend peers first to check whether they have the files cached. If yes, redirect the client. If not, it will have to fetch the files from the backend server and cache the file locally.

Anyway, if there is only one frontend caching server, the following should work:

location / {

root /var/www/cache; index index.html; error_page 404 = /miss; }

location = /miss { proxy_pass http://backend; }

The problem is that I will need to find a caching solution that will store the file in the local cache folder after serving the contents. Secondly, I will need a way to talk to the peers if I have more frontend caching servers.

Would it be worthwhile to pursue such a route? Or I should just use Squid.

-Liang