Re: [squid-users] To RAID or not to RAID...

From: Brian <hiryuu@dont-contact.us>
Date: Mon, 03 Jun 2002 01:19:06 -0400

On Monday 03 June 2002 12:29 am, Phil Oester wrote:
> I've got a dual 1ghz, 1gb system with 5x72gb drives, and am wondering
> what the best configuration would be for the drives/cache.

This would not be my first choice for a squid box. 1 proc and 2 gb would
perform better, overall. Squid is a single non-blocking process, so the
aufs threads and various system processes would be all that's on the
second CPU.

> Another possibility was to put Linux on 1 drive, then use a RAID 0
> stripe across the other 4 drives for speed. Granted, if I blow any
> single drive in the box, I'm hosed - but I'll have 3 total boxes in a
> load balanced configuration.

RAID 0 is good for single access, or splitting a single large file, but
worthless here. Squid deals with many small files, so it will naturally
balance over several drives.

Henrik, I think, declared squid a real-life worst-case scenario for RAID
5. I'm not sure about RAID 1, but I doubt squid does enough reading to
justify it.

> Any thoughts?
>
> Also - given the above 1gb RAM configuration, what is the largest cache
> size you would recommend? Should I use the available 270gb, or should I
> cut it off at some limit? I'll be using AUFS on Linux 2.4.

70gb is about the most you could cram without swapping into the ground.
30-40 would be a better idea.

I guess I would suggest RAID 1 on a pair of boot drives (so you can boot
through a single-disk failure) and splitting the squid cache across the
remaining three in a non-RAID setup. That's what, 10% utilization of the
drive? Ahh well.

        -- Brian
Received on Sun Jun 02 2002 - 23:19:13 MDT

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