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

On 22.06 22:47, Hendrik Voigtländer wrote:
> 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).

I do not think so. The same can happen if you have swap or not - it's
always used as virtual memory. Having more VM just delays running machina
out of it, which only happens if there's some memory leak in squid,
libraries or other applications running on that machine.

If your squid is not using more memory for longer time, we can assume
there's no leak, and as long as it only uses half of the RAM, you have
still 1 GB free for processes etc, so you probably do not need swap at
all.

> 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.

That is feature of VM systems, they store unused data onto swap even if
it's not needed. If in any case the mamory use will grow, unused data will
not have to be stored on disk because they alredy are, so the system will
spare swapping that time.

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