Re: [squid-users] How often should I restart Squid?

Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote:

>On 21.06 20:03, Hendrik Voigtländer wrote:
>
>>Yes, our proxy did use swap until I disabled it :-)
>>2GB RAM, squid process is stable at roughly 1GB process size,
>>nevertheless the machine started swapping.
>>I never figured out why, but the proxy is running fine without any
>>swapspace. This is dangerous with a squid still growing.
>
>
>growing in what way? is the process size still ~1GB?
>how much of that size is in memory (size/res values in top)?
>
With "growing" I mean the squid process increasing over the time. If I
read the FAQ correctly this could be caused e.g. if more and more
objects go in the the cache_dirs thus increasing the space needed for
the index, i.e. if squid starts with a clean cache_dir.
However, my squid is no longer increasing in process size, cache dirs
are full & the load is the same all day.

Snapshot from top (idle squid at night).
21603 proxy 9 0 1017M 1.0G 1180 S 0.0 50.3 1:46 squid

It uses roughly 50% of the RAM (machine has 2GB) , the rest is used by
other processes and buffers/cache.

I just think it is dangerous to disable swap, if one doesn't know how
large the squid process will get, i.e. probably larger than the physical
memory and this causing the OS to kill processes randomly (I had this
problem with java-stuff eating up all memory).

What puzzles me is that my machine started to use swap at all as plenty
of memory is available, that is why I disabled swap with a perfomance
boots as a result.

>>Using swap (for the squid process) affects performance.
>
>
>yes, but it can increase and decrease performance too, that depends on HOW
>it's being used.
>
Can you explain this a bit more? In my experience and according to
http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/FAQ/FAQ-8.html#ss8.11
I can see only performance impacts.

>
>>I would reduce cache_mem and probably the size of the cache_dir(s) to
>>avoid this situation.
>
>
>I don't think you need to do this...
>
Sorry, probably I need to rephrase that: I dont think that _I_ have to
reduce cache_mem and probably the size of the cache_dir(s), but I would
do this in Liz (Lizzy Dizzy) situation, i.e. if a squid eats up all
memory and starts to use swap to.
(http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/FAQ/FAQ-8.html#ss8.9)

Regards, Hendrik Voigtländer
Received on Tue Jun 22 2004 - 14:47:54 MDT