Reverse proxy question

[Louis LeBlanc]

Hey everyone.

Here's a question that may have been answered in the past, but I'm not
real satisfied with what I've found on Google.

I have been tasked with setting up a reverse proxy (open source,
probably squid) that is capable of handling 5000 requests per second
or more.  Yes, 5000/sec.  It's a world gone mad, I tell you.

Licensed products like iMimic and Volera are not options.  The OS is
flexible (I'm leaning toward a recent 4.x version of FreeBSD) and the
hardware is limited to what's on hand - either a Dell 2550 or 2650
with 1G Ram, 30G hard drive space, and varied CPU configurations.
What we have available are as follows: single 933MHz Xeon in the 2550,
single or dual 1.3 or 1.8 GHz Xeon in the 2650.

I realize that Squid relies more on disk seek times than actual
transfer rate or CPU power.  If I've been told right, the disks are
all mirrored 30G drives, but I don't have seek times on hand.

I know that most reverse proxies out there - both commercial and open
source are typically single CPU architectures, so that will be the
initial focus.

The problem I would like help with here is the version of FreeBSD that
would be more likely to handle this kind of load, particularly with
respect to Posix asynchronous I/O.  I've been told that 4.6 and
earlier didn't have great Posix A-I/O support, but is it better in
4.8, or should I jump to 5.0?

Also, if anyone knows of a reverse proxy that may be able to do better
than Squid, I'd certainly welcome the suggestion.  The benchmarks I've
seen online indicate I may need to improve squid by a factor of 10.
Not sure that's really an option unless the benchmark I've seen is
horribly biased.  Of course, if anyone has a web site that details
some of the finer tweaks that might at least get Squid close to the
requirements, that'd be great too.

Thanks in advance.

Lou
-- 
Louis LeBlanc               leblanc at keyslapper.org
Fully Funded Hobbyist, KeySlapper Extrordinaire :)
http://www.keyslapper.org                     Ô¿Ô¬

Armor's Axiom:
  Virtue is the failure to achieve vice.