I'm more of a LAMP web developer trying to help the sysop. When I joined a project, I inherited some old PHP spaghetti code. Some of that code is that it goes out to a third-party website (let's call it thirdparty.com) and pulls down content with an HTTP-GET request. Unfortunately, the way the code is designed, it needs to do this several times a minute. When we looked at the bottlenecks on the server with 'netstat -a', we saw that connections to thirdparty.com were constantly running when this content would be plenty fine to be gathered once a day.

What I need to know is if the Squid Proxy Caching Server is the solution we need? I'm guessing that this might let us have it pretend to be thirdparty.com on the network. If the web server needs to query thirdparty.com, it hits Squid instead. Squid can then determine whether it needs to supply content from cache or if it needs to go to thirdparty.com for fresh content.

Is this the solution we need? And second, is this easily configured and only to cache thirdparty.com requests?