Re: What is the capacity of a Squid server?

Bill Delphenich <bdelph@krjda.com> wrote:
> I am considering using Squid as my proxy server for HTTP and FTP for my
> company LAN. I have a Caldera Linux v2.2 test server running Squid and
> IP Masquerading and I have a few users accessing the Internet with it
> just fine.
>
> My concern is the maximum capacity of this server. I haven't been able
> to find any information about this anywhere. Is it asking too much to
> send 25 or 30 users through this server every day, including some fairly
> sizeable FTP uploads and downloads? Should I be looking at something
> more "industrial-strength".

Since Squid is a single-threaded select-based server, the single most
important thing to worry about, more important the disk speed or CPU speed,
is swapping. Anytime a page has to be swapped in, all connections through
that Squid will have to wait. If you only swap once a week, nobody is
likely to notice it, but if you swap frequently, people will be
dissatisfied.

I'd be amazed if a dedicated 66Mhz 486 with 32M of RAM and a pair of SCSI
drives (one for system one for cache) couldn't keep up with 25-30 users
with room to spare. Your Internet link would probably be the limitting
factor. Since it's hard to get 66Mhz 486's these days, and 32M of RAM is a
joke, and current IDE drives are pretty reasonable, if Squid _can't_ keep
up it's got to be because you've done something wrong in the setup
somewhere.

Later,
scott
Received on Wed Sep 29 1999 - 10:58:24 MDT