Re: [squid-users] Recommended Configuration?

Bill Arlofski wrote:

> A co-worker and I are in the early stages of planning and implementing a Squid cache server. In the past, with some clients, I generally took what hardware (and drive space) was available and made use of it without much regard to performance tuning etc. (ie: customer said "here's what I have... make it a Squid cache server" <grin>) I'd rather not do that in this case,and so here I am asking for some thoughts based on our system needs.
>
> Our network is connected to the Internet with a single T1. We support about 550 students and 250 faculty/staff. The students have network/Internet connectivity from their dorms, and many of the faculty do as well.
>
> My preference is to set up Squid on a Linux/Intel based server since I am very familiar with this type of a configuration. My question is, with the above network user base to support, what would be a good starting point for an Intel/Linux based Squid proxy caching server?
>
> Processor Speed?

Any modern processor will do. We ship a Celeron 733 in our smallest
model to support up to 2 T1 links and have cycles to spare.

> Memory Size?

Anything over 192MB should be fine...but it will also depend on the sise
of your cache.

> Should we bother considering mulit-link trunking (bonding) two 100Mbps ethernet connections to the switch, or is that just plain silly?

No. That would be silly.

> Also, regarding the cache volume:
> What is a reasonable size?

12GB is probably plenty for a single T1.

> RAID 1, or RAID 5? Seems like RAID 1 is the way to go for speed. Or maybe a RAID 1+0 for speed and redundancy.
> Can I get away with software-based RAID, or should we not play games and go for a hardware raid solution?

Don't use RAID at all for cache partitions. It would be silly and
counter-productive. There are ways to minimize the damage to
performance done by using RAIDed partitions, but it's cheaper and more
effective just to avoid it.

> Did I miss anything?

You aren't going to hit any performance problems, most likely...You
probably won't even hit the file descriptor limits of Linux (it defaults
to 1024--which is usually plenty for 1.5Mbits, but I raise them to 8192
on all of our boxes anyway).

I do recommend using an AUFS compile of Squid. And ReiserFS for the
filesystem is good too. But even those two things probably aren't
needed in your case. Any modern hardware with a standard Squid install
can probably handle it.

-- 
Joe Cooper <joe@swelltech.com>
http://www.swelltech.com
Web Caching Appliances and Support