[squid-users] Memory usage (I know it's been up before.. tricky business)

Hey all squid gurus!

We have a cache to which 6000-7000 clients are
connecting to (2.5STABLE5). On a typical day we are
handling 70-100 requests/sec and 8-11Mbit in network
usage.

The problem I am experiencing is that the machine
starts to swap (performance is still good though). We
have a cache of 90GB, 3GB of memory and cache_mem is
set to 128MB. We are caching quite large files to
speed up frequent downloads (up to 100MB files).

Acccording to the FAQ, this setup should use:
90GB cache = 900MB
cache_mem = +128MB
Add. mem = +20MB
Total recommended: 1048MB x 2 = 2096MB.

I still have 1GB left of memory. No other memory
intense applications are running on this server and
still it swaps out as much as 600-700MB before I
manually restart the cache. It's running on RHEL 3.0.

Any hints are appreciated. If more info is needed,
just let me know. I just don't see the reason to why
it swaps out so much.

---
Memory usage for squid via mallinfo():
	Total space in arena:  717313 KB
	Ordinary blocks:       713918 KB  15096 blks
	Small blocks:               0 KB      0 blks
	Holding blocks:         30652 KB      4 blks
	Free Small blocks:          0 KB
	Free Ordinary blocks:    3395 KB
	Total in use:          744570 KB 100%
	Total free:              3395 KB 0%
	Total size:            747965 KB
---
Thanks!
//Martin
	
		
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