Re: what is /tmp/squid.alloc & what is carp exactly?

Surinder S. Dio wrote:

> I have recently installed squid-2.1P2 on solaris 7 x86. I am getting a
> rather large file called squid.alloc generated in /tmp which seems to be
> some sort of letter (either c, f or m) followed by a mac address address.

You have compiled your squid with --enable-mem-gen-trace which is a
debugging aid. The numbers you are seeing are not MAC addresses, it is
memory addresses from each memory allocation done by Squid.

> As far as I am aware I havent compiled with any debugging or am not running
> with the debug runtime option - is this file necessary and if so can I just
> cp /dev/null over it regularly as it grows very quickly.

Recompile your Squid without any debugging options enabled. The rule on
what to enable is not to enable anything unless you know that you need
it. The features not enabled by default are either point features, in
development, experimental or debugging aids, and I guarantee that you
know what to enable once you need it.

Also remember to do a "make clean" each time you run the configure
script.

> Also could someone explain in laypersons terms what CARP is and when Iwould
> what it - the faq didnt make clear to me what the purpose of carp was.

CARP is a peering "protocol" designed by Microsoft, and primarily used
when building redundant arrays of smaller proxies. Squid has primitive
support for a CARP type array design, but it is far from a complete CARP
implementation.

See Microsofts documentation on their proxy for a full description of
CARP.

---
Henrik Nordstrom
Spare time Squid hacker