April 24th, 20088 Legs to the rescue
Been working on a small probelm with major web site with few collegues
The site uses tomcat and cocoon to generate HTML using XSLT from XML based content. However the XSLT in cocoon is VERY CPU intensive, and recent increase in web traffic (cause by some very effective marketing campaigns) to the web site has caused the platform to become unstable
Enter My 8 legged friend, SQUID
Squid has a very small binary foot print (10Meg), a small memory footprint (12Meg and does not interfear with windows in any great way. When configured to sit in front of the IIS web server, tests on a POC server increased the throughput of rendered HTML from 12 requests per second taking almost 4 seconds to first byte, to a whoping 300 requests per second and 400mS to first byte.
Wow, now to fine tune the install and sort out on the Live platform