[squid-users] Squid latency at ApacheCon 2014 in comparison between Squid, NGINX, Apache Traffic Server, Varnish and Apache

[Anna Jonna Armannsdottir]

Hi everybody! 
My question may be rather theoretical, but in essence I need to know if
Squid really has a flaw regarding latency for connections where
keepalive is on. 

At ApacheCon 2014, Bryan Call presented slides where slides nr. 40 to 49
show where he writes on slide 46 about Squid: 
"Worst median latency for keep-alive benchmarks" . 
The slides are here:
http://www.slideshare.net/bryan_call/choosing-a-proxy-server-apachecon-2014 
The configuration for Squid is shown on slide nr. 36. To my eyes it
looks a little over simplistic. I hope he has not configured Squid
correctly and that somebody here can point me at better configuration
that expressly does not have latency of many seconds and a 95 percentile
of over 10 seconds. Those numbers were achieved by mesurement using
CoAdvisor 
( see
http://coad.measurement-factory.com/cgi-bin/coad/FaqCgi?item_id=ALL )

My intent, is to use Squid with CARP or VRRP as a reverse proxy and load
balancer for a cluster of webservers. 

My main reason for using Squid rather than NGINX or ATX or Varnish is
Squid's superior protocol compliance. Byan Call's demostrated latency 
gives me reasons for concern. 

I spent the last weeks searching but I have not found anything that
seems to counter Mr. Call's claim. On behalf of the Squid developers and
users, I would be wery grateful if anybody could show or demonstrate the
contrary. Preferably with configuration. 

About me: 
I have been a Squid proxy admin for almost 10 years now, and also
administrating web cluster solutions for a small university. I am
already deploying VRRP with NGINX as a load-balancer, but me and my
coworkers are not satisfied with its performance. 

Best regards, 
-- 
Anna Jonna Armannsdottir <annaj at hi.is>
University of Iceland Computing Services