I have a Squid question, thought I'd post it here since the set up is related to Wikipedia's, and no one on the Squid mailing list had any ideas...
We're running Squid in reverse proxy as an http accelerator, configured as described on meta.wikimedia.org. When our back end web server that generates the uncached content has problems (high load, etc) and becomes unresponsive, so does our front-end Squid server - that is request for cached and uncached pages become stalled.
is there a way that we can configure Squid to ignore this and continue to serve cached content to users when a certain timeout has passed when contacting the back end Apache server? it would be helpful in two ways, one, visitors accessing cached content won't experience the interruption, and two, connections to the back end server won't pile up, adding to the problem.
Any ideas would be appreciated. Travis