Re: [squid-users] speeding up browsing? any advice?!

From: Gavin McCullagh <gavin.mccullagh_at_gcd.ie>
Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 23:20:31 +0100

Hi,

On Sun, 10 May 2009, Roland Roland wrote:

> users on my network have been complaining of slow browsing sessions for a
> while now..
> i'm trying to figure out ways to speed sessions up without necessarily
> upgrading my current bandwidth plan...

Squid may help with this. However, you don't seem to say that you have
determined the cause of the slowness yet. One potential reason is your
users are saturating the available bandwidth. Another however, is that you
have loss on a link somewhere. Another might be your ISP over-contending
you or not giving you the bandwidth you expect. Another might be slow DNS.

Squid might indeed help in any or all of these situations. However, I'd be
inclined to monitor the edge router device with MRTG or similar and track
exactly how much bandwidth is being used. Also, I'd run smokeping across
the link to some upstream sites and see have you any packet loss. If you
know the cause, you'll be better able to address the problem.

> though one more question if possible, is there anything i could
> possibly do to speed up browsing aside what i mentioned earlier?
>
> keep in mind that i only added an allow ACL to my subnet... and that's
> it! is it enough?

For a start, you may want to look at increasing the cache_dir size. The
default is 1GB which is pretty small. The larger your cache, the larger
(albeit decreasingly) your hit rate will be. Once you have a large cache,
you probably want to increase maximum_object_size. If you want to save
bandwidth "Heap LFUDA" may be the best cache removal policy, as opposed to
LRU. There might also be some sense in looking at delay pools to better
prioritise the bandwidth given to individual users.

Optimising squid's caching can be a big complicated job.

Gavin
Received on Sun May 10 2009 - 22:20:35 MDT

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