Squid doesn't cache objects - sorta

I am the maintainer of the Debian squid package, and one of the
users submitted the following report to the Bug Tracking System.
Does anyone have a clue as to what could be causing his problem?

  From: Ketil Malde <ketil@ii.uib.no>
  Subject: Bug#48263: Squid doesn't cache objects - sorta
  Message-ID: <KETIL-vk1yacvo3nk.fsf@eris.bgo.nera.no>
  Date: 22 Oct 1999 16:45:19 +0200

I'm baffled.

Noticing that Squid seems a bit slow on my ageing pentium with Debian
2.1 installed, I went to investigate.

It turns out Squid is only using a fraction of its allotted cache
space, only populating the 00/00 directory. Worse, it doesn't
retrieve cached objects, on being requested an URL by a browser, it
dutifully fetches it, and logs a SWAPOUT and a TCP_MISS/200. Next
time it is accessed, it again logs a SWAPOUT, and a TCP_MISS/200, and
goes to fetch it anew, removing the old cached object (without any
RELEASE message, at least until some amount of objects are stored in
the cache - then I get the same behaviour, but with RELEASEs between
the SWAPOUTS)

What on earth can the problem be? I've considered the existence of
options limiting % of disk to be used, my cache disk isn't that empty
- although more than large enough for the allotted squid cache. But
surely squid should serve cached objects anyway?

Grateful for any help with this!

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