Has anyone tried out the Cisco Cache Engine ? Has anyone stress tested it ?

I'd like to. But I can't afford one. If someone wants to commission a third party analysis and will loan me the hardware, I'd love to stress test the CD.

Can it handle the load of about 100 Mbps of International Web traffic to be cached and 50 000 users ?

Its specs say yes. My gut feeling is "no". We've built such a machine and are selling it as a product, and now that I know how much harder transparent caching is than we thought when we FCS'd back in February, I'm betting that your users will complain if you put the choke point that far upstream. It's not a question of whether a 75xx and an array of cache engines can do that many transactions per second (I really have no idea whether it can), but rather, a question of path symmetry in robust networks of that size.

We will test it early next year on a private Internet network, however I was told that there were some hardware issues about to be solved ?

That's what I heard, too. (Cisco is the only other entrant into the trans- parent caching market, so we watch them pretty closely and listen to what our customers say about their Cisco testing experiences.) Cisco has been taking orders but not shipping for the last month or two. While the official story is about a hardware glitch, I think it's a lot more likely that they ran into the same basic architectural faults that we hit last Spring. Hopefully they will be faster at fixing them than we were. (See http://www.mirror-image.com/ for more details about our product.) Note that a technical discussion of transparent caching on this list would probably be no more welcome than a discussion of DNS politics. If you want to discuss this further, subscribe to the Squid list (see http://www.nlanr.net/). I answered this message publically because I wanted a chance to tell y'all about my box -- if anyone follows up with detailed questions or comments I'll answer them privately or not at all, I'm already on the thin edge of Randy's irritibility envelope with just the message you're now reading.

I'll be getting one soon for a 30 day eval. I plan to put it through it's paces and if it works and works well, we'll probably keep it. Regards, Joe Shaw - jshaw@insync.net NetAdmin - Insync Internet Services On Thu, 27 Nov 1997, Pascal Petit - SYNET wrote:

Has anyone tried out the Cisco Cache Engine ? Has anyone stress tested it ? Can it handle the load of about 100 Mbps of International Web traffic to be cached and 50 000 users ?

We will test it early next year on a private Internet network, however I was told that there were some hardware issues about to be solved ?

Thank for your help

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pascal Petit SYNET tel: 33 1 4696 0040 74, rue Roque de Fillol fax: 33 1 4696 0041 92800 Puteaux email: ppetit@synet.fr FRANCE http://www.synet.fr