[squid-users] Strange reject of users (basic auth)

Hi folks,

I have a strange squid-behavor with basic authentication.
Situation:
- I have 3 squid servers (2 dual xeon, 1 p3-1200).
Tonight Squid is stopped, some configuration files are updated, and
squid is started again. All with basic authentication via a Radius
helper.

Next day i fire up my browser and it keeps asking my password while
the radius helper started by hand says my password is okay.

It's not only on one squid-box, there are mornings 2 boxes have
problems.. strange enough that 3'rd box doesn't give errors (it's not
in de main LVS proxy array, but is a test/standby server).

What I do is a squid -k reconfigure on the box(es) giving problems...
and then everything is okay.

Does anybody have *any* idea where I can search this. I tried already
'squid -kdebug', but that gaves me a logfile of gigabytes within
minutes...

The problem occurs not only in the morning (=> low hits/sec), I got it just
10 minutes ago on a server under full load.
After 10 minutes it suddenly 'repairs' and everything will work fine..

I noticed that after some times struggling with the password input
the problem occurs with new users (password not in squid cache-memory)

Some more info from cachemgr:
- 98% space of 128MB cachemem used
- no queue for the 32 basicauth helpers
- max used helpers ~= 3
- external helper working okay (using external helper for database
  lookups, works fine, it just gives problem when trying to authorize
  basic-auth clients).

Thanks for your info, Janno.

-- 
Janno de Wit
DNA Services B.V.