Re: [squid-users] cache_mem

I noticed you had a problem with dnsservers being overloaded...Sounds
like you might need more extreme hardware on your DNS box, rather than
the Squid box. (But I may be wrong.)

What size internet pipe are you supporting with this box (or how much
bandwidth is being used for web traffic during peak periods, if the pipe
is shared amongst a lot of services)? It sounds like it is probably
6MBps, correct? We have a couple of boxes supporting 9 MBps worth of
traffic with only 10 dnsserver processes running and they rarely use
more than 5 of those.

Then again, Squid is very CPU hungry, particularly at higher request
rates. And if you've only got 350MHz per processor to give it, it may
be starving for think-time a bit. (I would have thought that a MIPs
would be a bit more efficient than an Intel at equal clock speed
though.) Obviously if Squid were multi-processor friendly, you'd be
able to make use of the rest of your box more effectively. That will
come eventually. Henrik's started talking about it, and usually when he
does that, he ends up doing it a few days later. ;-)

Florin Andrei wrote:

> On 20 Mar 2001 19:35:10 -0600, Joe Cooper wrote:
>
>> However, 60-100 reqs/second isn't all that hard of a workload, and
>> shouldn't take such extreme hardware (a single CPU, dual IDE disk based
>> system with 384MB of RAM can do that).
>
>
> The most puzzling thing is that, even with that "extreme hardware" the
> CPU load is much too high. As soon as it gets over 60 requests/second,
> the CPU usage for the main process (squid) goes over 95%. The other
> processes (diskd, dnsserver, squirm) are on a much lower value.
> See these charts:
>
> http://www.geocities.com/elf_too/squid.html
>
> See what i mean? It's a damned 4-way MIPS server (R12000 / 350 MHz), and
> cannot go over 60 req/s without eating up an entire processor!
> Lucky me, there are 3 more R12000 procs available for the other
> services... :-)

                                   --
                      Joe Cooper <joe@swelltech.com>
                  Affordable Web Caching Proxy Appliances
                         http://www.swelltech.com
Received on Tue Mar 20 2001 - 19:24:32 MST