[squid-users] Slow Squid

Greetings List,

I am writing for ideas on how I can increase the performance of my squid
cache.

I am running:

RHEL ES 3.0
cache_dir aufs on ext2
squid-2.5.STABLE3-6.3E
adzapper version 3.3 with wrapzap
Two cache_dirs totalling 42.4 GB

The hardware is:

Dell PE 1650
2-Intel PIII 1133 MHz
4 GB RAM

The symptom is that during our peak utilization periods, when HTTP
requests get over about 750/min, the response time gets very slow, over
800 ms or so. I understand that squid is single threaded, but we are
running a number of the redirector processes and it seems that the CPU
workload is distributed fairly well. This is determined by examining
/proc/stat with MRTG. Neither CPU seems to reach above 55% utilization
so I do not think the system is CPU bound.

One thing that is concerning:

[root@proxy squid]# free -m
             total used free shared buffers
cached
Mem: 3778 3756 22 0 472
2154
-/+ buffers/cache: 1129 2649
Swap: 8997 715 8282

Do you think this is significant? Should I adjust squid.conf to reduce
this memory usage?

Also, I do understand that reiserfs is a recommended file system over
ext2; do you think it will make a large difference to change this?

Any suggestions for things I can do to determine why my cache is slow or
how to make improvements in performance?

Thank you in advance,

Grant

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Received on Mon Nov 15 2004 - 12:22:44 MST