Squid statistics: Which ones to focus on at first?

I'm a total novice with squid, but thanks to a well-commented sample
config and the good web site I have it up and running. I'm still
working on getting mrtg graphing up for this, but everything else is
working well. I have cachemgr.cgi running and I'm curious which of the
many, many statistics a newcomer should be focused on. I have a
dedicated FreeBSD 4.1 machine (PII300/96MB RAM) with a single cheesy IDE
disk running the whole show and during its first day of use we only
filled 860MB of objects into the 1GB cache directory and managed a 25%
hit rate.

Should I really care all that much about the mass of Squid stats and
instead focus on overall system stats with an eye on RAM increases
and/or a better, dedicated spindle for the cache directory and then
worry about Squid stats with an eye towards fine-tuning? Is there a
single "how well is squid running" stat or stats? (cache hit %, etc)?

I'm only serving about 600 users, so its unclear to me how much hardware
I might ultimately need. The Intel sizing guides seem kind of out of
date, or maybe I have more hardware than my puny userbase will ever
need.
Received on Mon Jul 31 2000 - 21:15:25 MDT