[SQU] is 2 better than 1?

Hey all,

I have Squid currently running on a machine with the following specs:

- Intel 810E motherboard
- Intel PIII 450MHz chip
- 256Mb SDRAM
- 2 x 9Gb Cheetahs (1 disk is partitioned into boot, system and cache
partitions)
- 2 3Com 3C905 10/100Mbps NIC (one for incoming, another for outgoing
traffic) operating at 10Mbps currently but will shift to 100 when a new
switch comes
- RedHat Linux 6.2 + patches and kernel 2.2.16
- Squid 2.3.STABLE1 with default settings (except for specifying my own
domain and IP stuff)

This machine is serving approximately 100 cable modem clients (each one on a
64Kbps QoS). My question is, does changing the hardware to this:

- Intel 815 motherboard
- Intel PIII 650MHz chip
- 512Mb SDRAM
- 1 x 4.3Gb IDE (boot and system partition), 1 x 9Gb (for cache1) and 1 x
18Gb (for cache2)
- 2 x 3Com 3c905 10/100Mbps NIC (one for incoming, another for outgoing
traffic) operating at 10Mbps currently but will shift to 100 when a new
switch comes
- RedHat Linux 6.2 + patches and kernel 2.2.16
- Squid 2.3.STABLE1 with default settings (except for specifying my own
domain and IP stuff)

make Squid perform better or do I need 2 machines with the original specs to
balance the load better? Some of our clients are complaining that they
achieve better performance by going direct than through our proxy. This is
especially true for web-based mails like Hotmail, Eudoramail, Girlmail,
Yahoo Mail and Mailcity. Bandwidth is at a premium here (Philippines) so I
would much rather throw hardware and/or software solutions to the problem
than increasing our bandwidth which is currently already at 512K downstream
and 64Kbps upstream.

Any advice/tips/suggestions would be highly appreciated.

TIA,

M. Yu

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