Re: Increasing Ram in Squid 2.1 patch2 on redhat linux 5.2

> Could anyone tell me how do I increase my ram from
> 128 mb to 256 mb on my system running squid 2.1 patch2
> on P-II 300.Do I just pop the ram on the board and that' it.
> Do I still need to configure the swap? Will Squid detect

These are mainly Linux or Red Hat questions. I've never set up a
Linux with more than 64M, but I believe special considerations apply
because the standard BIOS interface cannot report more than this
amount of memory. If you managed to configured for 128M and actually
use it, you should be OK by just generalising what you did previously.

Your need for swap depends on what else is happening on the system.
If squid is the only significant memory user, you probably only need
a token amount of swap and only if you need to run squid close to the
limits on memory.

> the increase in ram automatically or do I have to change
> some configurations.

Squid uses virtual memory, not RAM. Some of that is specified in the
configuration file and some is added dynamically. The operating
system will allocate that virtual memory between RAM and swap space.
Squid will try and use the dynamically allocated memory whether or
not there is sufficient RAM for it to do so efficiently.

If you need to ask these questions, it is unlikely that squid was
configured for your available RAM in the first place, so one must
question why you are increasing it. If you simply increase the
physical RAM, the extra space will go to Linux's disk cache, which
may well benefit squid, but may not help as much as letting squid
control the memory itself.

The extra RAM may not help at all if there is no locality of
reference in the web page accesses. On the other hand if there is
more than minimal swap space in use, you probably do need it.

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David Woolley - Office: David Woolley <djw@bts.co.uk>
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