Defaults chosen for another era

Tuesday, 1st October 2013

I had to set up squid last week for a reverse proxy type arrangement and I was pretty amazed to see that the default config file that comes with ubuntu still has the same example memory and disk cache entries that were probably around when I first set it up in the late 90's on Slackware.

eg.

cache_mem 100 MB

cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid3 100 16 256

100mb may have been a lot of memory way back when, but for the box I was using last week 28GB was a bit more like it. As a practical issue I was left wondering if the cache_dir entry was actually in GB and had to look it up.

Makes me wonder if everyone uses varnish or some other such new shiny these days and if there is some kind of beautiful symmetry around dinosaurs such as me using old dinosaur software like squid.