Is my squid too slow ?

Hello,

After reading squid FAQ, I'd like to know more about good configuration
of a proxy server with squid. Mine is running for some years, but I still
have reticent users who affirm squid is too slow.

My configuration:

Dec Aplha 3000 - M600
Digital UNIX V4.0E
192 Mb RAM
Swap 500 MB

squid-2.3.STABLE1 (configure option --enable-dlmalloc)
cache_mem 40 Mb
cache_dir 4000 (2*2000) Mb
Restart and logfile_rotate every week
Approximately 1200 clients, request hit 35-40%, byte hit 20%
 
Now for the questions:
- "swapon -s": In-use space is growing from 5-10% up to 25-30% at the
end of the week. Is this alarming ? Do I really need to restart squid
every day ?

- From the Cache Manager, I see "Storage LRU Expiration Age: 3.96 days"
It can be very lower (2 days or so) at the end of the week. Do I need
to increase cache_dir ?

- From the Cache Manager, I see the ratio "Page faults with physical i/o"
/ "Number of HTTP requests received" growing from 0.07 to 0.2-0.3
According to Squid FAQ, it's not good...

I'm waiting for any suggestion, or comparison criteria.

An example of my Cache Manager/General Runtime Information:

---------- CUT ---------
Squid Object Cache: Version 2.3.STABLE1

 Start Time:
            Mon, 13 Mar 2000 00:02:26 GMT
 Current Time:
            Tue, 14 Mar 2000 10:28:09 GMT

Connection information for squid:
        Number of clients accessing cache: 849
        Number of HTTP requests received: 817386
        Number of ICP messages received: 0
        Number of ICP messages sent: 0
        Number of queued ICP replies: 0
        Request failure ratio: 0.0000000000000%
        HTTP requests per minute: 395.7
        ICP messages per minute: 0.0
        Select loop called: 6325854 times, 19.593 ms avg
Cache information for squid:
        Request Hit Ratios: 5min: 35.5%, 60min: 36.1%
        Byte Hit Ratios: 5min: 14.7%, 60min: 20.1%
        Storage Swap size: 3728637 KB
        Storage Mem size: 40956 KB
        Storage LRU Expiration Age: 3.95 days
        Mean Object Size: 9.97 KB
        Requests given to unlinkd: 234295
Median Service Times (seconds) 5 min 60 min:
        HTTP Requests (All): 0.72387 0.42149
        Cache Misses: 1.54242 0.89858
        Cache Hits: 0.18699 0.12783
        Near Hits: 2.02066 0.72387
        Not-Modified Replies: 0.20843 0.10857
        DNS Lookups: 0.19488 0.15593
        ICP Queries: 0.00000 0.00000
Resource usage for squid:
        UP Time: 123942.644 seconds
        CPU Time: 17334.464 seconds
        CPU Usage: 13.99%
        CPU Usage, 5 minute avg: 32.89%
        CPU Usage, 60 minute avg: 36.14%
        Maximum Resident Size: 103304 KB
        Page faults with physical i/o: 107882
Memory usage for squid via mallinfo():
        Total space in arena: 118450 KB
        Ordinary blocks: 114671 KB 1720 blks
        Small blocks: 0 KB 0 blks
        Holding blocks: 1224 KB 2 blks
        Free Small blocks: 0 KB
        Free Ordinary blocks: 3779 KB
        Total in use: 115895 KB 98%
        Total free: 3779 KB 3%
Memory accounted for:
        Total accounted: 94949 KB
File descriptor usage for squid:
        Maximum number of file descriptors: 4096
        Largest file desc currently in use: 442
        Number of file desc currently in use: 322
        Files queued for open: 0
        Available number of file descriptors: 3774
        Reserved number of file descriptors: 100
        Store Disk files open: 20
Internal Data Structures:
        374470 StoreEntries
          8548 StoreEntries with MemObjects
          8458 Hot Object Cache Items
        374162 Filemap bits set
        374145 on-disk objects

--------- CUT --------

Thanks for your time,

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________
Magali BERNARD (Magali.Bernard@univ-st-etienne.fr)
CRITeR - 23 rue du Dr Paul Michelon - 42023 St-Etienne Cedex 2 - FRANCE
Tel: 04.77.48.50.62 Fax: 04.77.48.50.69