[squid-users] Many small objects crashing Squid?

Hello!

We seem to be able to crash Squid consistently in a particular scenario.
Here's what appears to be happening:

We use Squid in http accel mode and it works great in normal situations.
However, we're using it in an application in which it now may end up caching
many many very small objects. It seems that there's plenty of cache dir
space left. However, there's a finite amount of RAM that gets allocated for
each StoreEntry (FAQ I think says 100 bytes, probably a fair amount more,
per object). This adds up obviously with lots of teeny objects. It seems
that when we get to a certain number of objects in the cache we start
seeing xcalloc failures, which I believe can't mean much other than Squid is
out of memory.

Would this be expected behavior in a situation where the cache ends up with
huge numbers of very small objects? And . . is there a way to configure
Squid to simply limit the total number of objects in the cache in some
graceful way without considering memory usage? As Squid starts reaching
disc SIZE limits, it handles swapping objects out quite gracefullly. What
would be great for our problem is if there's a way to trigger similar
behavior as Squid approaches a maximum NUMBER of objects in the cache . . .

Apologies if I missed a solution to this problem elsewhere.

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Received on Fri Nov 01 2002 - 13:38:24 MST