RE: Advice: for a U450

I'm just now finishing up a deployment of Squid in support of around 2500
users. We didn't even go as large as a 450. The hardware I'm using is an
Ultra 10 server (not the workstation class) with the standard 256 MB of RAM
and a Sun MultiPack disk box with 6 4GB Ultra SCSI disks. I've configured
4GB of cache, 4GB for logs, and 4GB for OS, binaries, and configs. The
other 12GB is used for emergency backup since the server is located in
Europe and the support staff is in the US. I'm using a script that
synchronizes configurations and binaries between the two root disks, and use
a couple of nvaliases to switch between booting one or the other.

Last time I checked, our prime-time usage is something like 2-3
requests/second (we're a business, not an ISP). The CPU is typically
running 80-90% idle, and we don't see a lot of paging. Since we just
installed, and we're servicing a diverse user population, our cache hit rate
is extremely low right now (only 4-5%), but performance is still quite good,
even accounting for the lag of going across the private WAN lines back to
the States to get to the Internet connection. I'm sure that we could
improve things even more by moving to a 100MB connection instead of the
current 10MB one.

Based on some preliminary Polygraph benchmarks performed before deployment,
I show that this hardware can easily handle sustained request rates of 10-25
requests/second, depending on predicted cache hit ratio (10/sec. at a 15%
CHR, 25/sec at a 55% CHR). Not bad for hardware costing <$15,000.

Jon

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Stagg [SMTP:squid@bae.co.uk]
> Sent: Thursday, May 20, 1999 3:40 AM
> To: Randall Badilla Castro
> Cc: squid-users@ircache.net
> Subject: Re: Advice: for a U450
>
> Hi Randall,
>
> I use several E450 servers for big Squid applications and they generally
> perform extremely well with very large numbers of clients.
>
> I would suggest, from the performance of our boxes, that the processor is
> the least likely item to need an upgrade (unless, of course, your E450s
> are doing more than just Squid!)
>
> The best upgrades to make at this point would be simply adding more memory
> and hard disc space. To give you an idea, our E450s have 1Gb of memory and
> 12Gb of Squid space.
>
> Do ask if you want any more info.
>
> Rgds
> Richard Stagg
>
> On Wed, 19 May 1999, Randall Badilla Castro wrote:
>
> > Hi all:
> > I'm using a Sun 450 Entreprise server machine with 128 MB ram, 2
> > GB for squid and a 100 MB FastEthernet Nic directly connected to our
> > 10/100 3com Switch. This machine don't use the swap partition, but I
> want
> > to increase the responsiness of the machine. (explaining: the machine is
> > hited by ~1000 machines... so the disk is always pumping) I want to know
> > what can improve the machine another 128MB of ram of a second processor
> > just to bound it to the squid process. I need your advice since the
> memory
> > upgrade cost ~$2K and the second processor ~$2.5 on my country. Then I
> > want to choose the best option!
> > Any comment is welcome!
> >
> > TIA,
> > Best Regards
>
> ---------------------------------
> Richard Stagg
> Internet Architect
> squid@bae.co.uk
Received on Thu May 20 1999 - 04:27:34 MDT