Re: [squid-users] Is Squid slow?

Steve Snyder wrote:

> I really can't answer your question about relative performance because I've
> never used a caching Web proxy other than Squid.
>
> Also, nobody is claiming that Squid is the fastest caching proxy available.
> Check out the Cache Bake-Off results.

What SLai is describing is not a limit on throughput--he says he is
seeing long load times and "after a few I could not use it anymore". I
guess that's after a few requests. Of course this isn't normal...he's
got a broken Squid/OS/machine.

 
> One more comment on performance. Most of the subscribers to this list seem
> to be interested in improving their max hits/second, the better to serve a
> large number of users. My interest is in maximizing performance for a
> small number of users, so I'm more focused on raw throughput than hits/sec.
> I haven't had to tweak Linux itself (increasing max file handles, etc.),
> but that may help in your environment.

That may appear true on the surface (that most folks want more
throughput at the possible expense of latency), but actual development
of Squid has gone the other direction. Latency under load is better in
2.5 than in both 2.2STABLE5 and 2.4, as far as I can tell...That said,
latency has always been very good in Squid. As you say, check out the
benchmarks--our results and Duane's results generally place among the
very 'quickest' (I think we're usually well to the better side of the
response time graphs).. Ok, looking at the graph:

http://www.measurement-factory.com/results/public/cacheoff/N03/auto/all/rep.rptm.mean.save.ratio.html

Swell was 11th out of a field of about 30 entries and Duane's Squid box
was an even more respectable fourth place. This field is generally an
indicator of how hard the box is being pushed--go at a lower request
rate on the same hardware and software and the response time will come
down by some amount. Squid in 2.5 maintains extremely quick response
times at the expense of almost anything else (if it is becoming
overloaded it does load shedding at the disk I/O layer to keep response
quick at the expense of hits).

 
> Maybe if you posted some specific statistics some people on the list could
> pinpoint were your bottleneck is. Besides the intrinsic reporting
> capabilities in Squid, I find that the Calamaris log parser
> (http://cord.de/tools/squid/calamaris/) is useful in identifying what is
> actually going on in Squid.

I'm not sure why SLai is even posting...he doesn't seem to want advice
(won't even tell us what Squid version, what tuning he has tried or what
load he is supporting)--just someone to tell him Squid is slow and
MSProxy is fast. Neither is true. Squid provides less throughput at
the highend of the market than many of the proprietary caching systems
(MS Proxy is not among these--MSProxy is not a high throughput server,
though Microsoft do now sell an unrelated and quite high end caching
proxy package). Squid has no problem providing excellent response in
low to midrange networks...if someone is experiencing slowness their
system is broken in some way, and they need to be asking for help with
/their/ specific problem.

SLai, we're all usually very helpful here, but you've got to give us
something to work with.

> On Tuesday 04 December 2001 01:38 am, SLai wrote:
>
>>Steve
>>
>>I am using MS Proxy on NT 4.0. The speed of http access from client wks
>>is fast compared to using squid. It takes a a long time to load the
>>pages. I use Squid on Linux Mandrake 8.0. And after a few I could not use
>>it anymore.
>>
>>Personally, from your own experience with Squid on Linux, what do you
>>think of the speed! Fast, slow??
>>
>>Thanks.
>>
>>Steven
>>----- Original Message -----
>>From: Steve Snyder <swsnyder@home.com>
>>To: <slai@sceptre.com>; <squid-users@squid-cache.org>
>>Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 6:35 PM
>>Subject: Re: [squid-users] Is Squid slow?
>>
>>
>>>On Monday 03 December 2001 05:11 pm, Steven Lai wrote:
>>>
>>>>I have been experimenting with Squid for the last week! Compared to
>>>>MS Proxy Server, Squid seems slow!
>>>>
>>>On what operating system?
>>>
>>>Are you comparing MS Proxy and Squid on the same hardware?
>>>
>
>

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