Re: squid

[Adam Tauno Williams <adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I'm curious how many of you are running a squid proxy, and on what
>hardware under what bandwidth. 

One at home,  5 clients 604k DSL.
One at work, >150 clients  fractional T1

At home it runs on the same server as everything else (Dual PII, 256Mb)
At work it runs on an AMD K6-2 @ 3xxx MHz, 256Mb.

Both seem to cache 30~40% of the Internet traffic.  At the office the "real" job
of the squid proxy is to cache Intranet traffic, as they are dynamic pages build
from a *large* database, and it reduces the load on the web/database server to
about zero.

Squid seems to like memory a lot,  I/O speed helps but only seems to really come
into play under heavy loads.  Config matters alot too.
 
>We're sharing a 56k modem right now at work(its either that or buy a t1,
>and isdn doesn't make much sense right now) and it works fine, but I'm
>curious about caching our surfing.
 
>Our current email(imap)/masq. box:
>166MMX Pentium
>32mb ram
>4gig ide HD
>56k isa modem
>3com pci nic 3c905
>BSWare 6.0 #21.0 w/kernel 2.2.14

Seems tight on RAM.  My squids all want about 24Mb each just for themselves. 
Try and put the cache dir near the center of the disk.  Reiserfs with the
"noatime" option gives a nice and usually noticable performance boost.  Multiple
cache dirs on diffrent spindles helps more than RAID mirroring/stripe across
spindles.  Squid spends alot of time walking hash tables, so a peppy CPU helps
(more than what you've got, say 233MMX) but only to a point unless you've got
lots of cache.

Systems and Network Administrator
Morrison Industries
1825 Monroe Ave NW.
Grand Rapids, MI. 49505