Performance bottlenecks

Caches today
Today, squid can handle max 200-300 req/sec on a very powerful multi-CPU alpha server
In contrast, come cache vendors can handle up to 2500 req/sec on similar hardware

Why is squid so slow ?
Squid was designed to be an academic research project, not a fast web cache
Squid development has been slow in the last 2 years due to most cache hackers being hired by cache vendors (not me, hah!)