[squid-users] streaming clients and memory usage

I have a modest system running squid for a small lan.
The box has the following specs:
Pentium 233
64MB RAM, 128MB swap partition
OS = Slackware Linux 7.1
Squid version = 2.4.STABLE1

The problem I'm seeing is that periodically, the memory
usage of squid will go up but the allocated memory
never gets released. After a while, I just have to
shutdown and restart squid or it would eat all swap.

I think I have traced it down to the use of streaming
audio with windows media player by some users. It seems
that whenever they are using this, the memory usage of
squid increases linearly over time.

I have the following parameters set in squid.conf.
cache_mem 8 MB
maximum_object_size 30240 KB
maximum_object_size_in_memory 5000 KB
cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid/cache 300 16 256

I originally had set a much larger maximum_object_size
and assumed that this was the problem, but lowering it
to a more reasonable value didn't help.

I have also made a chart which clearly illustrates the
problem. I have put it online at the following location:
http://antimatter.myip.org/squid/index.html

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. For
now I have just blocked access to the "offending" streaming
site, but this is not an elegant solution.

Regards,
Jan Van der Veken
System Engineer
Connect NV
Received on Thu Aug 09 2001 - 03:15:32 MDT