[SQU] Squid goes nuts and eats all my memory

I run a smallish squid cache on FreeBSD (168MB RAM, 1.5GB cache
directory, dedicated box) for about 500 users. I've been running it
since July and it's been great for both keeping net bandwidth in line
and speeding up commonly accessed sites.

However, about every two months, squid runs riot and eats all my memory
and about half my swap for no apparent reason. The only "cure" seems to
be purging the cache and rm-ing the cache_swap.log file from the system;
stopping squid and restarting doesn't help.

Is my cache getting corrupted or what's happening? I monitor a bunch of
squid stats with mrtg and I don't see anything obviously starting to go
wrong, I only notice web browsing slows to a complete crawl. Checking
the machine I see all physical RAM consumed and about half the swap.

Is it considered reasonable practice to periodically wipe the cache and
the cache_swap.log files? It kind of kills caching for a few days, but
we run with an 8 day max window anyway, so its not a big deal.

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