Solaris x86 and Squid

Important update regarding Squid running on Solaris x86. I have been
working for several months to resolve what appeared to be a memory leak in
squid when running on Solaris x86 regardless of the malloc that was used. I
have made 2 discoveries that anyone running Squid on this platform may be
interested in.

 Number 1: There is not a memory leak in squid even though after the system
runs for some amount of time, this varies depending on the load the system
is under, Top reports that there is very little memory free. True to the
claims of the Sun engineer I spoke to this statistic from Top is incorrect.
The odd thing is that you do begin to see performance suffer substantially
as time goes on and the only way to correct the situation is to reboot the
system. This leads me to discovery number 2.

Number 2: There is some type of resource problem, memory or other, with
IPFilter on Solaris x86. I have not taken the time to investigate what the
problem is because we no longer are using IPFilter. We have switched to a
Alteon ACE 180 Gigabit switch which will do the trans-proxy for you. After
moving the trans-proxy, redirection process out to the Alteon switch Squid
has run for 3 days strait under a huge load with no problem what so ever.
We currently have 2 boxes with 40 GB of cached objects on each box. This 40
GB was accumulated in the 3 days, from this you can see what type of load
these boxes are under. Prior to this change we were never able to operate
for more than 4 hours.

Because the problem appears to be with IPFilter I would guess that you
would only run into this issue if you are trying to run Squid as a
transparent proxy using IPFilter. That makes sense. If there is anyone
with information that would indicate my finding are incorrect I am willing
to investigate further.

Thank You,

Jeff Madison
Systems Engineer
(801)924-0900 x 101
Received on Mon Nov 09 1998 - 11:47:12 MST