Traffic Server speeds Internet access, enhances website performance, and delivers unprecedented web hosting capabilities.
This chapter discusses the following topics:
Global data networking has become part of everyday life: internet users request billions of documents and terabytes of data, on a daily basis, to and from all parts of the world. Information is free, abundant, and accessible. Unfortunately, global data networking can also be a nightmare for IT professionals as they struggle with overloaded servers and congested networks. It can be challenging to consistently and reliably accommodate society’s growing data demands.
Traffic Server is a high-performance web proxy cache that improves network efficiency and performance by caching frequently-accessed information at the edge of the network. This brings content physically closer to end users, while enabling faster delivery and reduced bandwidth use. Traffic Server is designed to improve content delivery for enterprises, Internet service providers (ISPs), backbone providers, and large intranets by maximizing existing and available bandwidth.
To best suit your needs, Traffic Server can be deployed in several ways:
The following sections provide a summary of these Traffic Server deployment options.
As a web proxy cache, Traffic Server receives user requests for web content as those requests travel to the destined web server (origin server). If Traffic Server contains the requested content, then it serves the content directly. If the requested content is not available from cache, then Traffic Server acts as a proxy: it obtains the content from the origin server on the user’s behalf and also keeps a copy to satisfy future requests.
Traffic Server provides explicit proxy caching, in which the user’s client software must be configured to send requests directly to Traffic Server. Explicit proxy caching is described in the Explicit Proxy Caching section.
As a reverse proxy, Traffic Server is configured to be the origin server to which the user is trying to connect (typically, the origin server’s advertised hostname resolves to Traffic Server, which acts as the real origin server). The reverse proxy feature is also called server acceleration. Reverse proxy is described in more detail in Reverse Proxy and HTTP Redirects.
Traffic Server can participate in flexible cache hierarchies, in which Internet requests not fulfilled from one cache are routed to other regional caches, thereby leveraging the contents and proximity of nearby caches. In a hierarchy of proxy servers, Traffic Server can act either as a parent or a child cache to other Traffic Server systems or to similar caching products.
Traffic Server supports ICP (Internet Cache Protocol) peering. Hierarchical caching is described in more detail in Hierarchical Caching.
Traffic Server consists of several components that work together to form a web proxy cache you can easily monitor and configure. These main components are described below.
The Traffic Server cache consists of a high-speed object database called the object store. The object store indexes objects according to URLs and associated headers. Using sophisticated object management, the object store can cache alternate versions of the same object (perhaps in a different language or encoding type). It can also efficiently store very small and very large objects, thereby minimizing wasted space. When the cache is full, Traffic Server removes stale data to ensure that the most requested objects are readily available and fresh.
Traffic Server is designed to tolerate total disk failures on any of the cache disks. If the disk fails completely, then Traffic Server marks the entire disk as corrupt and continues to use remaining disks. If all of the cache disks fail, then Traffic Server switches to proxy-only mode. You can partition the cache to reserve a certain amount of disk space for storing data for specific protocols and origin servers. For more information about the cache, see Configuring the Cache.
Traffic Server maintains a small RAM cache that contains extremely popular objects. This RAM cache serves the most popular objects as fast as possible and reduces load on disks, especially during temporary traffic peaks. You can configure the RAM cache size to suit your needs; for detailed information, refer to Changing the Size of the RAM Cache.
The Traffic Server host database stores the domain name server (DNS) entries of origin servers to which Traffic Server connects to fulfill user requests. This information is used to adapt future protocol interactions and optimize performance. Along with other information, the host database tracks:
Traffic Server includes a fast, asynchronous DNS resolver to streamline conversion of hostnames to IP addresses. Traffic Server implements the DNS resolver natively by directly issuing DNS command packets rather than relying on slower, conventional resolver libraries. Since many DNS queries can be issued in parallel and a fast DNS cache maintains popular bindings in memory, DNS traffic is reduced.
Traffic Server contains three processes that work together to serve Traffic Server requests and manage/control/monitor the health of the Traffic Server system. The three processes are described below:
traffic_server process is the transaction processing engine of Traffic Server. It is responsible for accepting connections, processing protocol requests, and serving documents from the cache or origin server. traffic_manager process is the command and control facility of the Traffic Server, responsible for launching, monitoring, and reconfiguring the traffic_server process. The traffic_manager process is also responsible for the proxy autoconfiguration port, the statistics interface, cluster administration, and virtual IP failover. traffic_manager process detects a traffic_server process failure, it instantly restarts the process but also maintains a connection queue of all incoming requests. All incoming connections that arrive in the several seconds before full server restart are saved in the connection queue and processed in first-come, first-served order. This connection queueing shields users from any server restart downtime. traffic_cop process monitors the health of both the traffic_server and traffic_manager processes. The traffic_cop process periodically (several times each minute) queries the traffic_server and traffic_manager process by issuing heartbeat requests to fetch synthetic web pages. In the event of failure (if no response is received within a timeout interval or if an incorrect response is received), traffic_cop restarts the traffic_manager and traffic_server processes. The figure below illustrates the three Traffic Server processes.
Traffic Server offers the following administration options:
Traffic Server provides several options for network traffic analysis and monitoring:
Traffic analysis options are described in more detail in Monitoring Traffic; Traffic Server logging options are described in Working with Log Files.
Traffic Server provides numerous options that enable you to establish secure communication between the Traffic Server system and other computers on the network. Using the security options, you can do the following:
Traffic Server security options are described in more detail in Security Options.