[squid-users] No disk cache: cache_mem or TMPFS?

Hello,

I'm preparing to running Squid 2.5 as an HTTP accelerator on a Solaris 8
machine with lots of free memory but a bottleneck in disk IO. Because I don't
want Squid's disk IO needs to preempt those of PostgreSQL, I'd like to avoid
using a disk cache at all. (The machine is rebooted so infrequently that I
don't care about the lack of permanence of a memory-only cache.)

My question is this: is it better to just increase the cache_mem option to the
amount of memory I'd like Squid to use, or should I use TMPFS (SunOS's memory
filesystem) as a cache_dir with diskd? The way I see it, if I went with TMPFS
I'd want to turn off cache_mem completely, otherwise I'd end up with objects
cached in memory twice. Or am I foolish to even consider doing this at all?

(SunOS admins: I'm aware that I have to make sure /tmp doesn't use up all of
TMPFS and that all TMPFS mounts compete for the same memory space by default.)

Unloading services to a different machine is not really an option, nor is
buying another drive.

Thanks,

--
Omer Shenker                          http://omershenker.net/