Re: SQUID DECREASING PERFORMANCE

Hi Patrick

> It seems I still don't have fully understood the sense of cache_mem and
> maybe cache_dir. I always get quite short on memory when I cache a lot (and
> even if I don't). Why can you say that cache_mem 48 means half of the

aah: one of the most common problems!

Let's ignore 'cache_mem' for a while.

When you install Squid and start it, it uses a small amount of memory
for in-memory tables and the like. As objects are added to disk, it
uses some memory to keep track of which objects are there (it can't do
a linear search of the entire disk, so it keeps a structured table of
objects in memory.)

Each object added uses something like 75 bytes of memory.
If you check the store_avg_object_size value in squid.conf, you will
find that the average size of requested objects (on most caches) is
13 KB.

If you have a gig of disk space (that's 1024*1024*1024 bytes), you can
thus fit ((1024*1024*1024) / (13*1024)) objects on it, which comes to
about 80 000. If each object uses 75 bytes of ram, you need about 6
megs of ram per gig of disk. Note that this includes things like:

o Squid: the binary
o Squid: space for parts of objects that are "in transit"
o memory leaks
o operating system buffering
o network buffers
o other programs on the machine

So, I would guess that 7megs of ram per gig of disk would be fine for
most people.

> cache_dir will be put in memory? Would a cache_mem 1 be aedequate for us as
> well?? Could you give me a hint how I should set up cache_mem and
> cache_dir when I have:

Ok: now, let's consider the 'cache_mem' value.

Opening files on disk is Slooooowwww compared to sending them from
memory (even if the OS has the file in the cache, you will find that
the 'open()' command slows things down.) It's worth taking the
most-requested objects and storing them in ram if your cache is
loaded. So that you don't end up using all of the ram in the machine,
you can set a 'maximum size' allocated to popular objects. This is the
cache_mem value.

The person in the previous mail only had 100Mb of disk for his cache.
Since he had cache_mem set to 48Mb, he was keeping almost 50% of his
cache store in memory... and it's an incredibly small cache..

So, he should store only 1mb instead, and use the memory for other
things.

> About 15 GB available for squid-cache
> 256 MB of RAM

Hmm. 15*7 = 105. so, 105Mb will be used straight off. You have
about 1.2 million objects (I think.)

> No other services running on the machine
> Right now more than 2300 requests per proxy in busy times (there are 4
> proxies, all the same config, all about the same amount of requests)
> (I guess, not sure about that) something over 10'000 ICP messages per
> minute.

With that many ICP requests, you will use lots of network buffers.
That's 166 per second. Kernel's often don't like lots and lots of very
small packets, so you should ensure that you aren't using almost all
of your ram. You also want lots of memory free for buffering: your
disk access time is almost always a limiting factor on caches. Of your
1.2million objects, you will probably find that only a few 100 are
actually hit incredibly often. Let's allocate some memory for the 1000
most requested objects (remember that each object is 13kb or so): that's
1000*13KB = 13000kb memory.... 13 megabytes. so, set cache_mem to 15,
run Squid and leave the rest as is.

Oskar
Received on Fri Apr 09 1999 - 13:58:45 MDT