Cache Structure Strategy Question

I have a BSD/OS 4.1 system. It has 512 MB RAM and dual 550 MHz Pentium III
processors. It has 4 9 GB SCSI-3 disk drives. One of the drives is
configured as a system disk. The remaining 3 physical drives are configured
as a single 27 GB stripe set. Soft updates are enabled on the system drive
and the stripe set.

The system is intended to be the parent Squid cache for other caches on the
LAN as well as being used directly by browsers. The question is what is the
"best" way to structure the cache. Would it be better to have a single
large cache directory? Or, would there be an advantage to having multiple
cache directories?

Example 1:

        cache_dir /var/www/squid/cache 10000 16 256

Example 2:

        cache_dir /var/www/squid/cache0 2000 16 256
        cache_dir /var/www/squid/cache1 2000 16 256
        cache_dir /var/www/squid/cache2 2000 16 256
        cache_dir /var/www/squid/cache3 2000 16 256
        cache_dir /var/www/squid/cache4 2000 16 256

If one anticipates the need to expand the size of the cache over time, is it
better to have similar size cache directories? Is there a negative impact
in having multiple cache directories.

Merton Campbell Crockett
Received on Fri Aug 04 2000 - 13:09:13 MDT