[squid-users] http downloads slow.... then time out

Hi there,

I'm fairly new to Linux, but over the past few months I've been testing
firewall/gateway setups.

Smoothwall (2.0 gpl beta), ipcop , mandrake 9.0 with bits addded, Madrake
Security MNR, Clark Connect etc etc.

Some of them are 2.4 Kernel with iptables and some are 2.2 with ipchanins.
Some have squid integrated, some don't.

But _ALL_ of them give me trouble with http downloads both downloading a
file or a very large web page. The initial few k seems fine (i.e if its a
small web page) but then it slows down and of left the download will time
out. If I do a direct FTP download I get 60k/s plus, as I do if I turn off
squid.

The machine I'm using for the firewall/gateway is an AMD K6 233 with 64K
cache (Pentium 2 equivalent), 256 Mb ram, 256Mb swap. Current usage as
follows :-

Memory UsageType %Capacity Free Used Size
Physical memory 41% 147.96MB 101.98MB 249.94MB
Disk Swap 0% 248.05MB 0.00KB 248.05MB

Mounted Filesystems
Mount Type Partition %Capacity Free Used Size
/ ext3 /dev/hda2 29% 1.40GB 639.18MB 2.13GB
/boot ext3 /dev/hda1 19% 23.09MB 5.81MB 30.47MB
/dev/shm tmpfs none 0% 124.97MB 0.00KB 124.97MB
                        Totals : 28% 1.55GB 644.99MB 2.29GB

The firewall/gateway has 2 NICs (one compaq intel etherexpress based pci and
one netgear tulip based)
eth0 is the tulip, DHCP assigned from my cable modem (blueyonder). its set
to autodetect speed
eth1 is the EE, static assigned (192)

I've messed around with the squid cache mem sizes and disk cache sizes
(they're default now) and they seem to make no difference whatsoever to the
performance of the box.

As I said - ALL of the setups, different kernels, different versions of
squid etc etc behave the same way. when I turn on squid, my downloads stop.

Browsers being used are either IE6 or k-meleon (mozilla based) on WinXP pro,
win98SE or WinME client machines.

anyone got any suggestions for me to try?

cheers

-Griz
Received on Sat Jan 25 2003 - 12:32:14 MST