Re: squid storage: stripes vs separate drives for cache dirs

jw@kirk.de.uu.net wrote:

> It's quite the same at our systems: currently we are running one with
> async-io and the other one without this option, both configured with
> a big stripe of 5 disks.
>
> At the current load we mostly see no performance differences.

My recommendation regarding the use of async-io in Squid is to start
without it. Only if Squid seems to be disk I/O bound on your system then
try using async-io. Also note that you get close to the same performance
gains by using a logging or asyncronous update filesystem, combined with
appropriate virtual-memory tuning to have enought memory on the free
list even on heavy I/O activity. Blindingly turning on async-io in Squid
without also looking into these issues is perhaps not the best approach
to the problem, and may actually cause more problems than it solves.

--
Henrik Nordstrom
Spare time Squid hacker