Best Cache Engine/software to use?

kfarris · November 8, 2015

Hello and thanks for your help,

So what I need to get setup and going by end of today is a caching server. Now all it needs to do is cache updates, installation files, and downloads. It does not need to cache websites or media files.

Why? well because it's intended to be used for a lan party. Where using a lot of powerful computers for gaming I will have probably 40 people or more here on monday. All it needs to do is cache game installations/updates or windows/driver updates.

The hardware I am using is 3 intel ssd 480gb, AMD quad core A10 6800k 4.5oc, ram 16gig 2400 oc, onboard GPU i've got 2 gigabit ethernet cards linked to the network one dedicated down and up to the PC. I'm using a stripped down version of windows 10 Pro N.

I was wondering if their was an engine that I could simply download and run/setup I really don't have time to make one from scratch. Does anyone know of an engine that can handle these simple tasks?

Does pfsense support caching?

jameshumphries47 · November 8, 2015

i also would like one but for websites

leadeater · November 8, 2015

Squid proxy or any firewall appliance that uses squid will likely be your best bet. However getting it to do what you want is not something that just works out of the box.

Simplest thing to do and the quickest is to configure squid with large cache setting, force caching of everything (ignore no_cache), set a very large max file cache value and set long cache TTL. Configure all computers to use the proxy and start the first doing the updates etc, either wait till first is done or 15 mins then start the rest in the same order to make sure you cache hit. Can't guarantee everything will cache properly.

When you're finished make sure to set the computers to not use the squid proxy, with forced caching of everything you might get unexpected results in general web browsing etc.

If your using steam games just copy the files to a shared folder for everyone. Paste the files to steam library then force a verify, steam is awesome for just letting you copy files like that. A lot of older games also don't even care if they were installed using the installer or just copy/pasted either, so long as you have the prereqs installed (dx, dot net etc).

leadeater · November 8, 2015

@jameshumphries47 website caching is the core reason squid exists. ISP's used to use squid to cache traffic but this has gone out of fashion a bit now (or a lot). Proxies like squid are mostly used on corporate networks as better technologies have come about to do a better and more flexible job for web/file hosts.

Content delivery networks (CDN) are used to give fast reliable access to websites and content as close to the requester as possible. You'll be hard pressed to find a major web company that doesn't use a CDN, and even if they don't your ISP likely has products from someone like Akamai caching it locally anyway.

Akamai, and competitors, have a wide range of network products for ISP's that are used to help give faster and more stable internet browsing and routing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akamai_Technologies

Edit: Could have saved myself some time typing