[SQU] squid slower than without

Hi All,

I've been running Squid for a year or 2 now, generally a small cache with
default settings. Lately, I've been playing with a larger setup on a BSDI
box. The setup is an AMD K6/450 with 320 meg of RAM and a 9 gig Ultra SCSI
drive. I've deviated from the default squid.conf in only 2 ways; I've set
the "mem" to 100 meg and the "dir" to 5000/16/256.

When I first boot it up, and the cache size is small, like 20 or 30 meg,
it's real snappy. But a day or so later when the cache has reached it's
limit, like 180 - 200 meg, pointing a browser at the proxy makes browsing
slower than without the proxy.

I am not in a bandwidth starved environment and I'm wondering if it might
just be that simple. That is, my T-1 is only reaching about 60% on peaks
according to the 5 minute average graph on MRTG. Could it be that the
circuit itself is faster than the cache at this point or should squid
always be able to deliver quicker than the circuit?

TIA

Rk

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