E: subscribe squid-dev interest.

> This would be very cool. Some aspects of this already exist,
> but a clear
> cachemgr page would be most excellent. I presume you are thinking of
> something like:
>
> Mean elapsed time to:
> permit or deny request: 0.02 ms
> redirect request : 0.1 ms
> establish a connection to a server: 45.03 ms

---
	Something like that.  One of the things I'm focusing on lately
(for 
better or worse) is getting to know WinXP.  I stayed with Win98 through
most of my time working in IRIX and Linux the past several years and
used
Vmware starting, maybe, 3 years ago to run the Office apps I needed so I
didn't have to exit Linux.  
	Needing voice recogn. and a friendlier UI for my RSI I had to go
to
Win as main OS.  Linux is nice, but definitely not as much point and
click.
But studying Win tech as much as possible while I'm at it.  It's been
real
frustrating dealing with trying to find information with a closed source
--
not like...say a few months ago, I was playing around with some SCSI
disks
and noticed I could get maybe a Gig or more extra space if I formatted
an 18G
drive with a 4k block size vs. 512bytes.  Unfortunately, I'm living on
the
edge with XFS and XFS croaked on the 4k block size.  It was easy to
verify --
yep...there it was, hard coded values for 512byte sectors....You-gly
(ugly).
At least I knew where not to beat my head against the wall.  With Win,
you can
search for stuff for days and come up with nothin'.  The folks at MS
often
don't know the answer either.  It's more like pathfinding in an unmapped
jungle -- and in come cases, the information just isn't there.
	One of the things NT has besides CAPP/C2-compliant auditing and
a great
ability to 'backstep' when you mess things up, is its performance
subsystem.
Builtin to many subsystems are tons of performance counters.  Something
like
2500 of them for various parts of the OS.  I can think of many things
they
don't provide, but another feature provided is the ability for users to
supply their own counters -- which can then be displayed with the system
tools, 
and also -- a programmatic way for users to use their own tools to pull
information out of the counters to play with as they wish.  You don't
like
the level of job (process + its descendents) accounting detail?  You can
write
a program in user space that can collect the info.
	Internally, parts of the OS use the counters to determine what
order
blocks load in from a program allowing a couple of things: 1) developers
can
use the info and feed it into the linker to order the way their routines
are
laid out in memory to optimize application responsiveness and read-in
time.
2) The OS can determine what blocks from what files are loaded during,
say, 
boot -- and keeps a selectable (numbers in the registry) number of boot
traces (default, 8).  Then every couple of days, the OS automatically
reorganizes the files on disk to optimize for fast boot times.  One
could
argue that optimizing for boot could save time at the expense of other
operations -- say opening a database while a compile is going on.  But! 
Waiting for 30-45 seconds for a boot is a far cry better than the 2-3 
minutes my linux dual processor machine takes.  
	MS did studies and found that long boot times were something
that stood
out in users' minds as a single longest point of frustration (like
because
it blue-screened so much! :-)).  So addressing user-perception even if
it
might be at the expense of later on processing was considered a
priority.  
In addition to boot optimization, the OS also keeps track of application
usage.
Frequently used directories are hashed and stored in the registry and
the
hash and file names are stored in a pre-fetch queue based on what files
users
access during a given session.  Again -- last 8 traces are saved.  Along
with boot optimization, the OS automatically reorganizes to place the
files you
use the most toward the front of the disk continguously.  There's a file
that
tells the organizer "here's a list of 4000-5000 files, and here is the
order they should be in based on the user's usage".  Dunno about the
current
optimizer, but previous optimizers actually padded the executables so
that
individual segments could be on disk bounaries so raw-io could be done
directly into user memory -- no going through a disk-cache buffer.
	Of course there is a performance counter to find out how many
reads
had to be broken apart due to the data not being contiguous on disk or
the lockable memory limit not being set high enough to allow an entire
128M
file to be read in one large read -- the lockable I/O page limit --
another
tunable.   Anyway...maybe you get the picture.  WinNt OS's (like XP)
with
all of their bad points have some good points that other OS's could
learn
from.  Too often, people want to throw out the baby with the bathwater,
so to
speak.
 
> Another good idea. There are several log alteration projects 
> around, we
> are looking for a sponsor to make the most generic one 'happen', which
> is very similar to what you suggest (in fact, it's a superset 
> in all but
> one aspect - the recording of all data).
---
	Well, I have no idea how much time I'll have.  Even though I'm
off
work on disability (on top of having been laid off), I still seem to
find not
enough hours in the day to do all the things I want done -- and I need
to spend
more time in the real world doing things as well.  Computers are an
infinte
timesink.  The disability comes from RSI problems which haven't gone
away -- any
time I seem to actually approach doing serious programming, I start
getting
more symptoms -- so I have to watch the intensity level and try to stay
in 
a healing mode whilst waiting for the insurance company to get the
ergo-equipment
suggested by my ex-companies ergo person 2 months before I was laid off
(they 
didn't want to foot the bill for the equipment either, prefering to show
me the
door, instead).  Not having the built in recording has been a thorn in
my
side for almost a year now since I bought my Sonic blue recorder.  To
use
it, I have to allow it free-access to Sonic Blue's servers, I've not
been
willing to do that.  So it's sat on a shelf -- since I'd like to be able
to
record the initial conversations.  Another project on a back burner.
	Some of my projects take a long time to get done....*sigh*....if
I can just figure out a way to do without the need for sleep....:-)
> 
> Yep. We use that with diskd. I'm currently rewriting the IPC support
> routines to be more modular, but that shouldn't interact 
> badly with what
> you mention.
---
	Ah, very cool.  It seems like one of the things linux has lost 
along the way is the pluggable-modularity that characterized the initial
power of linux -- the chaining together of disparate utilities to come
up
with new uses -- allowing users to use more powerful basic building
blocks
to come up with new paradigms to use and process information.  With
linux --
if you want to do anything, you really pretty much have to be a system 
programmer with knowledge in C/C++.  No object oriented Visual Basic or
javascript interfaces to the OS or utils here.  With Win -- tons of
utils
have interfaces -- hooks, so they can be called programatically -- the
registry interface is a prime example.  Try developing a user-space
program
that allows you to tweak your screen and OS internals that has been
around
for 8 years.  The basic interface has remained the same -- some of the 
variables have *slowly* changed, but with Linux, you'd be lucky if your 
interface program lasted a year before it needed to be rewritten to 
comply with the latest Linus creation.  Etc. etc. etc....
	With squid, I've used it for over a year, maybe 2, and before
that, Netscape's proxy.  Always wanted to accelerate my internet here at
home.
I'm always wondering where some of the delays are -- especially some
things
I know should be in the cache.  I also play with DNS/named to look for
tweaks there since many times its just a 5 second delay looking for the
site
I notice...oh well...
-linda