Re: [squid-users] Load Balance Authenticators

Amos / Kinkie, thanks for your replies.

From what I see, I don’t see how increasing the number of helpers
could help resolving the problem as I see there are even idle helpers
at the time when the squid crashes. Actually I am doing a capacity
test on our local squid box, I am curious to know how I can avoid the
crash in order to get a consistent result. I ran the same ramp test
twice, but the crashes occurred at different times. Any advice or
suggestion will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Jacky

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 5:04 AM, Amos Jeffries <squid3_at_treenet.co.nz> wrote:
> On 27/05/11 08:54, unjc email wrote:
>>
>> Hello there,
>>
>> I encounter a performance issue.  I found that the squid proxy crashes
>> occasionally due to "Too many queued negotiateauthenticator requests".
>>  When I monitor the server by querying "squidclient
>> mgr:negotiateauthenticator", I discovered that not all authenticators
>> are busy at the same time.  It seems like only the authenticators on
>> the top of the list are busy with queued requests; but many of others
>> down at the bottom of the list are basically idle.  It looks like a
>> load-balancing problem among the authenticators.  Please advise if
>> there is any setting for load-balancing authenticators in squid.conf.
>
> Yes. There is no point "balancing" helpers. Each is pinned 1:1 with a client
> login for the entire time it takes to operate. When the first is pinned the
> seconds gets used, etc. Once the first helper is released, it can
> immediately be used for another client without swapping it in/out of memory
> just to reach one that has not been used yet.
>
>> cache.log:
>>
>> 2011/05/25 03:04:44| WARNING: up to 199 pending requests queued
>> 2011/05/25 03:04:44| Consider increasing the number of
>> negotiateauthenticator processes to at least 239 in your config file.
>> 2011/05/25 03:05:01| storeDirWriteCleanLogs: Starting...
>> 2011/05/25 03:05:01|   Finished.  Wrote 0 entries.
>> 2011/05/25 03:05:01|   Took 0.0 seconds (   0.0 entries/sec).
>> FATAL: Too many queued negotiateauthenticator requests (201 on 40)
>> Squid Cache (Version 2.7.STABLE4): Terminated abnormally.
>>
>
> Upgrade to 2.7.STABLE9. There are several negotiate and helper fixes in that
> version. Maybe an underlying problem is resolved already.
>
> If it continues there, you could try following Squids advice which was
> displayed at your peak load:
>
>> 2011/05/25 03:04:44| Consider increasing the number of
>> negotiateauthenticator processes to at least 239 in your config file.
>
>
> Amos
> --
> Please be using
>  Current Stable Squid 2.7.STABLE9 or 3.1.12
>  Beta testers wanted for 3.2.0.7 and 3.1.12.1
>
Received on Fri May 27 2011 - 14:11:25 MDT