Re: squid 2.1.x using too much memory

Irfan Akber writes:
> I have squid 2.1.x running for quite some time and I have noticed that it
> is using too much memory and bringing the system down to a crawl. Should I
> remove the swap.state or any other file so that it can rebuild the cache
> contents as I have reduced the cache size.

There are a number of memory leaks in Squid which have been discussed
earlier on this list. The latest patch level (2.2STABLE4) fixes many
of these but possibly not all. I've also seen an odd crash of Squid
after it's been up much over a week at a stretch; general accumulation
of crud in memory structures may have more to do with your slowdown
than the size of your cache.

You might consider as a general good practice simply shutting down and
restarting Squid once a week at some odd time; with server software
that's not 100+% reliable, that can be a good way of improving the
uptime. I added the following "squid.weekly" to our weekly batch
processing on the server that runs it:

        echo "Rotating squid logfiles:"
        squid -k rotate
        sleep 5
        echo "Shutting down squid!"
        squid -k shutdown
        sleep 3
        echo "Restarting squid!"
        squid

This seems to work fine for me so far; around 3 seconds downtime per
week is not a lot.

  -- Clifton

-- 
 Clifton Royston  --  LavaNet Systems Architect --  cliftonr@lava.net
        "An absolute monarch would be absolutely wise and good.  
           But no man is strong enough to have no interest.  
             Therefore the best king would be Pure Chance.  
              It is Pure Chance that rules the Universe; 
          therefore, and only therefore, life is good." - AC