Re: [squid-users] Slow connections

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 03:44:17PM -0500, Ryan O'Rourke wrote:
> Here is some information from the cachemgr and "top" sorted by memory usage
> (like I said, this server gets very little use - and I have the cache
> function disabled):

why would you want the cache function disabled? A proxy that doesn't cache
will always be slower because it adds another step to each request, though
it shouldn't be noticable. It's the caching that saves you upstream downloads
and latency that gives if any speedups.

> Also, using Links vs. IE or Netscape doesn't seem to make any difference on
> the server running Squid or on a desktop machine behind the firewall.
> Connection times, downloads, etc are on average 4 times faster when
> connected directly to the Internet than when going through the proxy.
>
> Any more help would be appreciated. Thanks for all you've done so far.

Your "on average 4 times faster" needs to be clarified... do you mean
1KB/sec vs 4KB/sec, or 1sec/request vs 4sec/request? The first is transfer
rate, the second is usually latency.

Are you using any upstream proxies? The usual big source of latency is
upstream ICP ping times... and if you've misconfigured an upstream proxy
this can be bad. Some upstream proxies don't support ICP, and if your proxy
is waiting for an ICP timeout each request, then you effectively add ~2secs
to each request. For a single upstream proxy you shouldn't be using ICP
anyway.

If you have multiple upstream proxies on different interfaces, ICP rocks
because it can load-balence the links for you, but it still introduces
latency.

If you have a transfer rate problem, I'd be looking at your network
configuration.

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