Is Squid slowing down?

Is Squid slowing down, or have the numbers in access.log changed?

I tried upgrading from squid-1.NOVM.9 to squid-1.NOVM.20 today.
The upgrade went smoothly, but afterwards, I noticed that (according to the
access.log file) transactions were taking longer than before.

I use a perl script to monitor the average time taken by various types
of transactions. Here are some sample numbers for 10,000 transactions
with both old and new squids:

                        squid-1.NOVM.9

PROTOCOL STATUS AVERAGE TIME TRANSACTIONS
  HTTP ERR_CLIENT_ABORT 148198 msecs 59
  HTTP ERR_CONNECT_FAIL 54422 msecs 24
  HTTP ERR_DNS_FAIL 5104 msecs 62
  HTTP TCP_CLIENT_REFRESH 5903 msecs 410
  HTTP TCP_HIT 482 msecs 3737
  HTTP TCP_IMS_MISS 319 msecs 686
  HTTP TCP_MISS 2995 msecs 4662
  HTTP TCP_REFRESH_HIT 2424 msecs 202
  HTTP TCP_REFRESH_MISS 1891 msecs 139

                        squid-1.NOVM.20

PROTOCOL STATUS AVERAGE TIME TRANSACTIONS
CACHE_OBJECT TCP_MISS 1806 msecs 11
  HTTP ERR_CLIENT_ABORT 15528 msecs 89
  HTTP ERR_CONNECT_FAIL 35075 msecs 36
  HTTP ERR_DNS_FAIL 17040 msecs 24
  HTTP TCP_CLIENT_REFRESH 8069 msecs 369
  HTTP TCP_HIT 2296 msecs 5013
  HTTP TCP_IMS_HIT 2226 msecs 182
  HTTP TCP_MISS 7872 msecs 3888
  HTTP TCP_REFRESH_HIT 7352 msecs 216
  HTTP TCP_REFRESH_MISS 7790 msecs 155

Here's a copy of the script, in case you want to try it out:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#
# squidtimes.pl
#
# Feed this script a squid access.log file, and see what happens
#
# Earl Fogel, January 1998

while (<>) {
    ($junk,$etime,$junk,$status,$junk,$junk,$url) = split;
    ($proto = $url) =~ s#://.*##;
    $status =~ s#/.*##;
    $times{"$proto $status"} += $etime;
    $count{"$proto $status"}++;
}

printf "PROTOCOL STATUS AVERAGE TIME TRANSACTIONS\n";
foreach $status (sort keys %times) {
    next if $count{$status} < 10;
    $avgtime = int($times{$status} / $count{$status});
    ($proto, $stat) = split(' ',$status);
    $proto =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/;
    printf("%6s %20s %7d msecs %9d\n",
        $proto,$stat,$avgtime,$count{$status});
}

--
Earl Fogel
Computing Services              phone: (306) 966-4861
University of Saskatchewan      email: earl.fogel@usask.ca