EXT_DELAYER_ACL(8)

📦
version 7.7 · 4 versions
, in arch rolling

💅 EXT_DELAYER_ACL(8) — the delayer page, but make it make sense 🫶

okay so this is a User Contributed Perl Documentation situation, bestie, and honestly? she's iconic for it. sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, and let's get into it.

✨ NAME ✨

delayer — the Squid external ACL helper that just… adds artificial delay to requests. yes girl, that's the whole job. she's a professional procrastinator 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

delayer [--help] [--debug] [--log file] [--wait msec]

literally that's it. that's the whole vibe check ✨

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so it's a Squid external acl helper, right, and what it does is cause squid to delay responding to HTTP requests. that's the main character energy here — she slows things down on purpose.

the way that it actually works is: if you carefully craft the ACLs of a Squid setup (like, no cap, careful is the key word here 🎀), you can selectively delay requests received by a proxy. and then after the configured amount of time? it always returns "true". always. every single time. obsessed. 😌

💖 OPTIONS 💖

  • --help or -h — prints the help message to stdout. that's it, that's the whole thing 🫶
  • --debug or -d — emits debugging output to STDERR and ultimately cache.log. very much giving "i want to see everything" energy 🔥
  • --log /path/to/file or -l /path/to/file — emits debugging output to the specified file instead of STDERR. and yes, it also turns on debugging, sneaky little bonus 💀
  • --wait msec or -w msec — delays each request by the specified amount of msec. if you don't specify this option, the default is half a second, so 500 msec. every submitted request. default. no escape 🙈

🎀 CONFIGURATION 🎀

okay this is the part you actually need, bestie, because to engage it you use this snippet of configuration template in squid.conf:

external_acl_type delayer concurrency=100000 children-max=2 children-startup=1 children-idle=1 cache=10 %URI /path/to/delayer -w 200
acl delay external delayer
http_access allow acl1 acl2 acl3 delay !all
⚠️ the important bit, don't skip this: it is important that the acl referencing the delayer be the penultimate clause in the http_access line. it will cause delay to all requests that match all the preceding acls in the line. the !all clause at the end of the line will make it so that no traffic is authorized by this ACL — only the delay to evaluate the delay clause will be inserted before evaluating following http_access lines. 💀

also super important: place the http_access line carefully in the sequence of all http_access_lines. it should be near the beginning, but be careful not to insert unwanted slow acls (especially proxy_auth). don't do it. i'm serious. 😭

and here's a little gift: it is possible to customize how delay is calculated for each request by modifying the "calc_delay" PERL function in the script. the documentation on this is embedded in the source code comments, so iykyk 🌈

👑 AUTHOR 👑

this software is written by Francesco Chemolli <kinkie@squid-cache.org> — shoutout, king 🫡

 * Copyright (C) 1996-2026 The Squid Software Foundation and contributors
 *
 * Squid software is distributed under GPLv2+ license and includes
 * contributions from numerous individuals and organizations.
 * Please see the COPYING and CONTRIBUTORS files for details.
 (C) 2014 Francesco Chemolli <kinkie@squid-cache.org>
 This program is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the
 terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, or (at your opinion) any
 later version.

🌈 QUESTIONS 🌈

got questions about using this program? send them to the Squid Users mailing list <squid-users@lists.squid-cache.org> — they're lovely, fr fr 💜

🧚 REPORTING BUGS 🧚

⚠️ bug reports need to be made in English. no cap. see https://wiki.squid-cache.org/SquidFaq/BugReporting for the details of what you need to include with your bug report. 📋
  • report bugs or bug fixes using https://bugs.squid-cache.org/ 🐛
  • report serious security bugs to Squid Bugs <squid-bugs@lists.squid-cache.org> 🔒
  • report ideas for new improvements to the Squid Developers mailing list <squid-dev@lists.squid-cache.org> 💡

💀 SEE ALSO 💀

and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 this gem was brought to you by perl v5.42.2 and dated 2026-08-25, and it's filed under EXT_DELAYER_ACL(8) — go forth and slow down those requests responsibly 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from