Re: Tuning squid?

Peter Olsson wrote:
>
> Hello!
>
> We are having some problems with throughput in one of our squids
> which serve a couple of thousands of users. This squid hasn't been
> upgraded for a while, this will be my first step.

Throughput? are you running Squid in a dedicated machine or in a shared
machine with WWW,FTP,DNS?

Another thing that could hamper Squid operation could be the network, is
located in a shared 10Base-T, 100Base-T, or is in a Switched XBase-T?
 
> But I'm wondering if there are any good general tips for tuning
> squid performance. Particularly if there are any good things to
> change in squid.conf, I'm not very familiar with this file.

Yeah!, like some people in the list could explain to you better than me,
Squid is a really memory eater, the list of this that I mention to you
could boost the performance of Squid.

  - If you use Linux, apply the FD patch.
  - For caching, it's better to use SCSI disks rather than IDE drives.
  - If it's possible, upgrade the memory of your machine, all the memory
that your operating system don't use for processes, could be used for
buffers.
 
> I have read the parts on performance in the users guide on the
> web. We have 64 MB RAM in the server and diskswap on the server
> is almost never used. cache_swap in squid.conf is 500.

If you machine uses swap rather than real RAM, your squid is dead.

-- 
Regards,
        Alfonso Correas
        Comm NetWorks