fd, load balancing

Hi!

I'm new to this list - and I'll stay in here for a while, I guess. So: hi!
Let me first explain our setup:
We have 4 proxies, each with a DPT Cache/Raid controller (4 discs, RAID-0),
256 MB of RAM, P II 333 or 350. Those things are running squid 2.1-Patch2
under SuSE Linux 6.0 with Kernel 2.2.5.
Those 4 Proxies are peers of each other and are used for load balancing in a
round robin manner (DNS name pointing to those 4).
For now, the problems are: a) they do not perform very well in peak times.
Because they needed much too much RAM, I limited the cache_dir to only a few
100 MB, even if we have over 20 Gigs in each. Still, in the evening they get
quite slow. Well, they ARE quite loaded for sure...
Is there a better way to do the load balancing? Might it be a (bad) solution
not to peer amongst them?
The other question is a little linux 2.2 specific: It's stated that writing
a higher value in file-max in /proc/sys/kernel or something gives you more
filehandles. But I can do what I want, I always have 1024. That's enough for
the moment, but I get I'll get short on them sometimes again... With the
common patches for 2.0.x I could easily get 4096 file descriptors, if I
wanted to.
And, before beginning an OS war: I also tried free-BSD. It performed about
the same I'd say, but we had a few crashes, I guess related to the
DPT-driver.
Any thoughts?

Mit freundlichen Grüssen

Patrick Kormann
DataComm (Schweiz) AG
Projektleiter Technik
                                        

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