[squid-users] large squid machines

Here is my scenario.

 I have a ibm DS4200 SAN that has 5 dual dual core 2.0 6gb machines attached
to the san.
The san is SATA driven. Two  luns 2tb each, that have been lvm’d into ~4tb
all 5 machines are redhat es 4 64bit, and they all are running GFS. (will be
adding more drives to the arrays and adding luns to get some more IO)

Anyway I have a bottleneck its called IOPS,  we are currently turning on a
few sites a week onto the cluster  today we hit a brick wall we max’d our
IOPS.  So I’ve been researching squid setups all day and reverse proxy
setups.

I have squid up and running on one of the machines and squid is using a
tmpfs/ramdisk for cache_dir which seems to be working great, the problem is
we need to scale up to around 600/req/second to make this cluster perform
the way it should  so now we are looking into deploying  2 or 3 squid
servers to act as a frontend, we can do some load balancing rules to send
all image/movie/static content off to the squid servers which isn’t a
problem  the problem is configuring the everything to run smooth.  There is
currently  3.4TB of data on the san itself that needs accessing.  Ideally
we’d like to keep the most requested/cacheable content on the front servers
in hopes to speed up everything. 

The data is split into images 5k-80k in size and then movies, avi/wmv/mov
which are 10mb to 90mb and then there are a couple dozen ~1gb files. 
Obviously we wouldn’t want to cache the big files.. or do we?

I’ve been looking alld ay in the archives and see the disk  option and ram
option but I have never seen a good example of someone using squid on 16gb+
of ram.  We are looking into getting two machines right away.  We can do
multiple 15k rpm sas drives and/or ram we can get 4 machines for the price
of 2 machines with 24-32gb of ram and the 5 machines would have 6x 15k rpm
sas drives and 8gb of ram or there abouts.

So has anyone ever heard of/or done a deployment this large?  Squid not the
best method for doing this?  All in all these machines should be pumping
around between 500Mbps-700Mbps (its a lot of movie downloads)

Thanks for the feedback

-
Zak
Received on Wed Apr 04 2007 - 20:35:10 MDT