Can anyone help me make my reverse proxy actually cache?

Hi folks,

I'm trying to configure a Reverse Caching Proxy but so far have had no luck. I would preferrably like to use apache (that will be all it will be used for), but am open to solutions using other software that can also run on Mac OS X 10.6 (I have also tried using Varnish and Squid, but with no more luck).

We're running a system with about 80 mac mini clients that will be requesting lots of video from a server. To reduce load, we thought we could use Apache (which comes on the macs by default) to cache this video forever (or at least as long as possible) onto the macs' disks.

I have managed to get a reverse proxy set up with apache using ProxyPass etc, but when i tried to add CacheEnable disk / to the configuration, nothing happened (i do have mod_disk_cache included).

Can anyone help with my issue? The apache config file is here

Thanks in advance

Edit: So far I have been testing it with smaller text files, and it hasn't been caching properly. This suggests it is nothing to do with us actually downloading video, but actually to do with the cache configuration.

From serverfault Lenary

• requesting lots of video

  That's a rather loaded statement. How? The products you've mentioned all are HTTP related - if you're having problems with caching and HTTP and video, it makes me think that the clients may be using progressive download. Is that the case? IIRC squid and possibly lots of other proxies have trouble correlating range requests with fully cached content.

  You might want to consider serving up the content using a slimmer webserver (nginx?) for the static content. Note that as per my comment here the OS disk cache will be the most efficient place to cache the content.

  Lenary : i have updated the question with how i've been testing this - i have just been requesting small text files and yet it is not caching them.

  symcbean : Show us the headers in the request and response (NB fixing the caching for small files probably won't resolve the pseudo streaming issue)
  From symcbean