Re: Ideal hardware for squid proxy server

From: Bill Wichers <billw@dont-contact.us>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1998 15:07:27 -0400 (EDT)

On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Nicolas Gudino wrote:

> Hi List,
>
> I'm running squid with 3Gig cache on an IDE hard disk and pentium 133 with
> 64 mb of RAM under Linux Redhat 5. It works well, but the server is kind
> of overloaded. The hard disk is spinning all the time and it is not as
                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I certainly hope you don't mean that you've enabled "Hard disk spindown"
or something in your BIOS to "save power" and are wondering why your
Squid's drive never spins down... Servers shouldn't have power saver
features enabled -- it will hurt performance. Spinning up a hard disk
takes at best a good 7-10 seconds or so, and that's a BIG lag time for a
user that is trying to go somewhere.

> fast as I would like to. So I'm thinking on upgrade the hardware to improve
> performance. I would also like to increase the cache size to 9 Gig.
> Should I buy the fastest SCSI disk available, or an IDE disk will do? Is it
> important to upgrade the procesor, or more important is to increase memory,
> or both? Any advice would be great. Thanks in advance,

Stick a SCSI disk in there. If you need 9 GB of cache it might be better
to use two 4 GB drives instead of one 9 GB drive since by using the two
smaller drives you effectivly double your available disk bandwidth. If you
must make a cheap machine for budget reasons or whatever you should at
least be using the fastest UDMA drive you can find.

RAM is the most important thing for Squid. My formula for RAM: number of
SIMM slots * largest SIMM supported by motherboard = RAM to be installed
for Squid box. OK, that's a little bit optimistic but you get the idea.
I'd want at least 128 MB of RAM in a box like you're describing. 64 MB I
think is the absolute minimum for a Squid of any size. After RAM disk
speed is the most important, and processor power comes after that. If you
run a lot of redirectors or maybe if you have a huge ACL list a faster
processor might help. I rarely see Squid using even 10% processor on a
Pentium-based cache I run.

Definatly go with a SCSI disk though. Definatly.

        -Bill
Received on Wed Apr 29 1998 - 12:20:59 MDT

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