[squid-users] Request for your recommendation for ISP setup

Dear All,

First, please bear with me for the lengthy message. I'm really in need
of help from your expertise regarding a good, robust, high-performance
forward-proxy Squid setup for ISP customers.

I am running an ISP with around 500 customers. I've been using a single
Squid machine to do forward proxy for the customers to cache the Web
contents and thus save some costly bandwidth.

The single Squid machine has the following hardware specs roughly:

- RAM: 16GB
- CPU: 2 of 3 GHz Intel XEON CPUs
- Hard drive: 4 x 300GB SCSI drives

I use Squid-2.7STABLE9 on Fedora 12.

Right now, I allow only half of the customers (around 250 users) to use
this forward proxy machine and I notice that, the 16GB memory is used up
easily in 3 hours after Squid's startup.

I would like to know how can tweak that box for better performance than
it has now.
Or is it reaching the limit already?

Please find in the attached files for the Squid configuration, and cache
info & utilization.

I am also thinking of running 2 Squid machines as cache peers: one being
a child and the other a parent. For that setup, I would like to have the
child peer to do caching for local customers and redirect any outside
(Internet) destinations to the parent peer, which will not cache anything.

May I have your inputs on this setup: is it correct and does it follow
the best practice?
If it does, may I have some guidances/pointers on this from those who
had set up similar scenario before?

Hope for your kind advice.

Many thanks & best regards,
Khem