Cache peers or neighbors

Cache peers or neighbors are the other proxy servers with which our Squid proxy server can:

• Share its cache with to reduce bandwidth usage and access time

• Use it as a parent or sibling proxy server to satisfy its clients' requests

• Use it as a parent or sibling proxy server

We normally deploy more than one proxy server in the same network to share the load of a single server for better performance. The proxy servers can use each other's cache to retrieve the cached web documents locally to improve performance. Let's have a brief look at the directives provided by Squid for communication among different cache peers.

Declaring cache peers

The directive cache_peer is used to tell Squid about proxy servers in our neighborhood. Let's have a quick look at the syntax for this directive:

cache_peer HOSTNAME_OR_IP_ADDRESS TYPE PROXY_PORT ICP_PORT [OPTIONS]

In this code, HOSTNAME_OR_IP_ADDRESS is the hostname or IP address of the target proxy server or cache peer. TYPE specifies the...