Hit rate results

I am a rather experienced squid user on a small network (20000 accesses
per day) and would like to contibrute a bit to the ongoing hit rate
discussions.

My hit rate is about 45 % of all accesses, excluding denies and errors
with a LRU expiration age from cachemgr.cgi of about 14 days (nevertheles
the storage algorithm is not strictly LRU, I have tons of files in my
cache that have not been accessed for months). Once for no apparent
reason, ACLs stopped working and the hit rate fell to 25 % on the same
usage pattern.

How do you to get hit rates up ?
1.) deny using ACLs, what has no value or is accessed only once. I block
all types of counters, gobs of porn sites and porn search words on the
favorite search engines. This is a bit country specific, but you will
first get some ideas from the log files, and after blocking apparent
things I ran cron jobs to find certain unwanted patterns. Our cache
denies more than 5 % of all accesses with a single complaint in a year
(Anybody mind not seeing banners ?)

2.) set the stoplist pattern to empty
Nowadays most information retrieved through cgi-bin is static or changes
more slowly than cache contents.

3.) set the refresh patterns high
eg. 1 hour min. for text, 6 hours for images

4.) Use Reload_into_IMS
Before it was introduced I just suppressed "pragma: no-cache" and
consistently got hit rates above 50 %.

If someone would like specific information mailed, I would be pleased to
help out.

Regards, Gero

-----------------------------------------------------------
--- Ammirati Puris Lintas ---
--- Gero Dittmer, Mittelweg 177, 21048 Hamburg, Germany ---
--- phone: +49 40 41441217 fax: +49 40 41441616 ---
--- Internet: gdittmer@aplintas.de CIS: Gero_Dittmer ---
--- ... waiting for a unicorn under chapter eleven ... ---
Received on Wed Nov 12 1997 - 09:20:58 MST