Re: [squid-users] Re: Performance

On Fri, Jan 29, 1999 at 09:18:37AM -0500, Scott Bethke wrote:

> At 12:36 PM 1/29/99 +0100, you wrote:
> >- We use Squid on a Sun Sparc 5 Solaris 2.6 machine. We have 2 * 4 GB
> >cache-disk and 128 MB memory.
>
> What speed is the 5?? 70? 85? 110? 170?

As importantly, what version of squid? What do you have cache_mem set to?

Have you tuned any of the TCP/IP settings on the machine using ndd yet?
[see the SQUID FAQ, section 14, the Solaris Tuning Section]

Have you loaded the Performance and Tuning toolkit on the machine so you
can run its tools to see where they think the bottleneck lies?
[http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance/se3]

Have you got the latest kernel patch applied? If you have, you should
make sure you have priority_paging turned on.
[http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance/priority_paging.html]

> >- We have a lot of performance problems. Response to an normal page (in
> >cache = 180 bytes/s). We have an 2 MB connection to the internet. One
> >and a half week ago we had the same problem, cleaning the cache helpt
> >(for a week).
>
> Slowaris may be to blame, how fast are your drives? do you run the drives
> on a different SCSI controller or just on the built-in controller? Also
> ram looks rather small. For Solaris in this application I'd say 256M is
> the smallest

We have a E250 with 512Mbytes of RAM and ~28Gbytes of cache disk
here. There are 12 separate disks being used to provide the cache,
so we've got a nice large number of spindles. 2600+ users per day,
with over 1.2million requests. This machine is coping fine.

Given that, 256Mbytes memory for an 8Gbyte cache sounds like overkill
to me.

> >- This is a one task machine, only Squid is running
>
> Have you considered running a faster OS? like NetBSD or OpenBSD?

Before you bin the O/S, make sure you're getting all you can out of
it. There's an _awful_ lot you can do to Solaris to make squid run
better under it. Once you've done it, changing it may seem a
unnecessary step.

Cheers,

Chris

-- 
Chris Tilbury, UNIX Systems Administrator, IT Services, University of Warwick
EMAIL: cudch+s@csv.warwick.ac.uk PHONE: +44 1203 523365(V)/+44 1203 523267(F)
                            URL: http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/Chris.Tilbury