Simple TCP proxy

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, 30 Jul 2022 at 04:54, Morten W. Petersen <morphex at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> OK.
>
> Well, I've worked with web hosting in the past, and proxies like squid were used to lessen the load on dynamic backends.  There was also a website opensourcearticles.com that we had with Firefox, Thunderbird articles etc. that got quite a bit of traffic.
>
> IIRC, that website was mostly static with some dynamic bits and heavily cached by squid.

Yep, and squid almost certainly won't have a thread for every incoming
connection, spinning and waiting for the back end server. But squid
does a LOT more than simply queue connections - it'll be inspecting
headers and retaining a cache of static content, so it's not really
comparable.

> Most websites don't get a lot of traffic though, and don't have a big budget for "website system administration".  So maybe that's where I'm partly going with this, just making a proxy that can be put in front and deal with a lot of common situations, in a reasonably good way.
>
> If I run into problems with threads that can't be managed, then a switch to something like the queue_manager function which has data and then functions that manage the data and connections is an option.
>

I'll be quite frank with you: this is not production-quality code. It
should not be deployed by anyone who doesn't have a big budget for
"website system administration *training*". This code is good as a
tool for YOU to learn how these things work; it shouldn't be a tool
for anyone who actually has server load issues.

I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but the fact is, you can do a lot
better by using this to learn more about networking than you'll ever
do by trying to pitch it to any specific company.

That said though: it's still good to know what your (theoretical)
use-case is. That'll tell you what kinds of connection spam to throw
at your proxy (lots of idle sockets? lots of HTTP requests? billions
of half open TCP connections?) to see what it can cope with.

Keep on playing with this code. There's a lot you can gain from it, still.

ChrisA