Thank you, Richard, for replying. Oh, I see now, sorry about being confused about plos.org and the TOPAZ sites.

But just to make sure you do not misunderstand me, I was talking about two separate issues. Looks like #2 is still a problem.

1. HTTP Proxy/Cache, you use SQUID - good; Varnish may be marginally better (up to 1.5 times faster in my experience) but it looks you have more pressing issues at hand; this is no issue then;

2. GZIP compression of HTML, CSS and the like as it gets send to the browser. I just checked plosone.org - that's a TOPAZ site, right? And it also does not support this. Another proof is below.

Most modern browsers will do HTTP requests with 'Accept-encoding: gzip,deflate' and expect to be given gzip-compressed HTML in return. It saves bandwidth (at the cost of CPU time), and it typically makes the site appear faster, because pages load faster.

On-demand compression of HTML is completely different from how you
cache application objects in ehcache.

If plosone.org runs Apache, as seems from the headers, you should give a try to mod_deflate. This is a standard Apache 2+ module that does on-demand HTML compression transparently to the application that generates the HTML. You can configure it in 15 minutes and see if it helps.

From my console:


[toyvo@asusie ~]$ HEAD -H 'Accept-encoding: gzip,deflate' http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001092
200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:09:07 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Expires: -1
Client-Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:58:30 GMT
Client-Peer: 209.237.233.125:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=**********************; Path=/


If content was really encoded, the headers would have included a Content-encoding: gzip or similar header.

Finally, coming back to #1 (caching), Cache-Control: no-cache seems too restrictive for a static page, which this one appears to be. Relaxing this a bit can give SQUID some leverage and ease the load on the backend (TOPAZ). It can lead to unexpected behavior though if the page has dynamic elements that get updated while the cache does not know about it. This too can be worked around by PURGE requests... This is how Mediawiki does it - and those guys surely have some traffic :)