Re: [squid-users] best platform with squid

On Thursday 08 May 2003 03.30, richard.fuser@ernstyoung.com.au wrote:

> I have heard the likes on freeBSD, Linux being a better platform
> than Solaris x86.

FreeBSD and Linux is more common platforms, and more knowledge exists
about running Squid on these than any other platform.

Some also say that Solaris x86 is slower, but if you are happy with
Solaris and used to running this I would probably recommend using
Solaris. The OS and Squid tunings required for optimal performance in
high loads is somewhat different between the OS:es however and Linux
requires least tuning to perform.

> I have had someone tell me that they changed from Sun hardware to
> intel and ran linux and had dramatic preformace improvment.

This may be the case simply because they got a lot faster hardware, or
installed Squid better on the new box, or because Squid ran faster on
Linux.

As far as I know nobody has done any fair comparisations of Squid
performance on SUN vs X86 hardware, or FreeBSD/Linux vs Solaris.

If you have some spare boxes then setting up a lab to make these
compares is not overly difficult. Requirements:

  1. 2 benchmarking stations with Polymix-4
(http://www.measurement-factory.com/docs/PolyMix-4/ and
http://www.web-polygraph.org/)
  2. 1 switch or vlan on existing switch with no or marginally other
traffic
  3. 1 hardware of each model you want to compare.
  4. Time to set up the benchmark stations (estimate 2 days full time
if you have not set up a polymix-4 benchmark before)
  5. Time to instlall Squid properly on the different hardware/OS
configurations selected.

The configuration of Squid is almost identical on all except the
cache_dir type which should be aufs on Linux and Solaris but diskd on
FreeBSD. Note: Remember to read the FAQ entry on diskd configuration
for FreeBSD OS tuning requirements.

It is recommended to mount the cache disks with noatime on all
platforms.

For Solaris it is recommended to use filesystem journaling with a
separate drive for the journal (I think this requires disksuite).
This to make the filesystem write performance more comparable with
Linux/FreeBSD for applications like Squid. Alternatively you can use
the hack to enable async writes but in such case you almost certainly
will need to mkfs the cache partitions after a system failure
(powerloss/panic).

Regards
Henrik

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